Re: [Unicon-group] Opening a non-existent program as a pipe in Unicon

[Clint J. <je...@cs...>]

[Kostas discovers: open("hsf", "pw") | stop("Can't find the `hsf' program!")
does not call stop() on Solaris even when "hsf" is not a valid program.]

An interesting question would be: does the stop() get executed on any
platform?  Icon pipes are implemented using popen() and the semantics
may vary a bit across UNIXen and other platforms.

A second interesting question is: should we be so brazen as to do a path
search for the command prior to calling popen()?  I don't know whether the
Icon folks decided not to, or if the question didn't come up.  If the
requested command were somehow internal to the command shell, it would
not show up on a path search but the popen() might succeed anyhow. But
internal shell commands are obscure and nonportable enough that I'd be
willing to to a path search, possibly special-casing on any platforms
with internal shell commands, if no good arguments against one exist.

Clint