popen in non-blocking mode

[Joe McEachern <joe@...>]

Hi,

We are running an external process using io.popen(). Something like ...

 ecom = assert(io.popen(cmd, 'r'))

Is there a way to setup non-blocking reads with this type of interface? Or do other lua modules offer more control? What we've seen is that our read() command will block if the external process does not have any data to return. We need a strategy to make this non-blocking.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Joe