Re: Lua-Ex -- alive or dead?

[Duck <duck@...>]

> Hi Duck, hope the antipodes are treating you well

Christmas and New Year are back in summer where they belong.

> As for the builtin io.popen. It works fine in console programs,
> Unix/Windows. But it doesn't work _at all_ under Windows
> non-console

Yes, MSDN itself shamelessly admits that:

/If used in a Windows program, the _popen function returns an invalid file 
/pointer that will cause the program to hang indefinitely. _popen works 
/properly in a Console application.

and io.popen() uses (unsurprisingly) _popen() when built under Windows. 
You can selectively suppress this by undefining LUA_USE_POPEN in 
luaconf.h, which would be a simple way to prevent its use when building 
Lua for embedding in  Windows GUI app you know is Windows GUI based.

/To create a Windows application that redirects input and output, see 
/Creating a Child Process with Redirected Input and Output in the Platform 
/SDK. (Gratuitously complicated and _very_ slightly non-ANSI C code 
/included :-)

I had to laugh at the way MSDN describes a GUI binary as a Windows app, 
and a console binary as a Console app, as though it weren't pure enough to 
be considered a Windows binary at all, even though it runs on Windows :-)