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Hi Frank and Christophe,
On Thursday 09 June 2005 10:29, frank wrote:
> If one of the actions (like view) that call external programs fail, the
> error message (spit out on stderr) is either displayed in the terminal
[...]
> directory" will lead the user to the see manpage, and ultimately to the
> wrong mailcap entry.
on the occasion of implementing another feature I have also given this
request a second thought, but I regret that I didn't come up with a
solution. The problem, I think, is that I seem to have to fire up the
external viewers (like gv) as background processes, i.e. the code is
like:
system("gv foo.ps &");
If gv then fails, I seem nonetheless to get an exit code of 0, so I have
no way to find out from the exit code if the system call has really
succeeded in the sense we want. The reason why I send the process to the
background is that otherwise, the rest of the script is blocked until the
external app is closed.
Of course I could try to capture errors written to stderr somehow, but I
think this would make texdoctk dependent on which shell is actually used,
because this redirection is I think not the same for all shells (let
alone in other OSs). This would be bad, because in the interest of
portability, no assumptions should be made about the shell.
So, for now, I think I'll have to leave it as it is. Sorry.
Cheers,
Thomas
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Thomas Ruedas
Geological Institute, University of Copenhagen
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