I need to execute external programs and capture their stdout using  
parameters from a web form. This is a web application that should be  
portable to Mac OS X, Linux, *BSD, and Windows.

My understanding is that the natural way to implement this is to use  
IO.popen(ARRAY), which the 2nd edition of the Pickaxe says it's going  
into 1.9. Nevertheless it also says fork(2) is needed, and seems like  
this is going to be the case in 1.9 as well, but this is not  
mentioned explicitly. Will IO.popen(ARRAY) work on Windows in 1.9? If  
not, which alternative would you consider?

-- fxn