Spawning subprocesses with GNAT

["Condic, Marin D." <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

O.K. So a little bit of toying around with GNAT (3.10p) on a PC has proven
that it has a better (read "working") method of spawning a child process
than the Win32ada interface seems to have. (The function CreateProcess is
available, but no matter how I juggle around parameters, it seems to not
want to work.)

The package: GNAT.OS_Lib has a routine called: function Non_Blocking_Spawn
which successfully gets a child process running. This has advantages for me
in that I have to support my tool on both a Sun and a PC and with the GNAT
supplied package there is at least a reasonable chance that the interface
will be the same for both the PC and the SUN. The down side is this: I would
really like my sub-process to fire up a new window so that if it writes any
data out, it will not be interleaved with the output of the parent process.
I would also like a means of communicating with this sub-process. It is not
clear how to do this from the GNAT.OS_Lib package spec alone. (Unless you
can use the various file subprograms to set up a pipeline between the two?
Any chance that this would be semi-portable?)

Has anybody had any experience playing around with these operations which
might be useful?

MDC

Marin D. Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney
Government Engines & Space Propulsion
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
Ph: 561.796.8997         Fx: 561.796.4669

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