Re: io.popen (and close)

[roberto@... (Roberto Ierusalimschy)]

> I know that io.popen is a poor stepchild---undocumented and unloved
> but useful on Unix platforms nevertheless.  (Actually I notice that as
> of Lua 5.1 it is evern documented.)  To make io.open even more useful,
> I would like to be able to get the exit status returned by pclose(3).
> I notice that the specification says only that file:close() returns
> a non-nil value on success.  Would it be possible to change the
> specification (and implementation) so that if f = io.popen(...),
> then f:close() returns the exit status?  What do the Lua team think?

I am not sure that the meaning of the value returned by pclose is
standard.  Several man pages say only that -1 means error. But if
this status code is really spread and really useful, it should not be
difficult to change that for 5.2.

-- Roberto