On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, S. Robert James wrote: > Yep, that's how I came across this problem initially. > > Doing that (replace 'cat -' with my command) hung indefinetly. > Commenting out the stderr line fixed it. I assume that it was waiting > for something to write to stderr before progressing. > > Now, you are correct that the external process had terminated. Why > that didn't close stderr and move on I do not know. More importantly - > is there a way to do what Tom is suggesting - that is, have Ruby move > on the second the external process terminates - that will work on > Windows as well? check out systemu > (As an aside, kudos to the developers of popen4 - it's really great.) i am 99% positive that the implimentation of popen4 does not play well with windows and may be impossible to make it do so. the systemu package i just released is my attempt and an alternate implimentation. give it a while and let me know how it goes. regards. -a -- my religion is very simple. my religion is kindness. -- the dalai lama