popen()

[Steve Yelvington]

[In article <90061.202350CMH117 at psuvm.psu.edu>,
     Charles Hannum <CMH117 at psuvm.psu.edu> writes ... ]

> popen() cannot be implemented under DOS.

Man can't fly, either. At least not without building an aircraft.

The functionality of popen/pclose can be duplicated by using temporary
files. The calling program need not know the ugly details. For the limited
application mentioned by the original poster -- uncompressing a file and
reading the output -- it's even easier. It need not work internally like
Un*x popen to have the desired results.

I'm writing this on an Atari ST running TOS, which essentially is an
MS-DOS workalike for the Motorola 68000. When I store it, postnews will
pipe it to rnews, which will (among other things) pipe it to uux. So
you're looking at evidence that it can be done in a single-tasking
environment.

Surely it can be done under MS-DOS, too.