Sorting filePro Arrays

[Fairlight]

In the relative spacial/temporal region of
Sun, May 18, 2008 at 06:20:18PM -0400, Bob Stockler achieved the spontaneous
generation of the following:
> That worked on Windows Me and the filePro version I had on it in
> 2003 when I wrote to programs, but it doesn't now on Windows XP
> and the latest version of filePro.
> 
> The array is written out to a tempory file OK, but the file to
> which SORT's output is redirected doesn't contain anything.  I
> got a command ("cmd") prompt and executed:
> 
>   SORT sort.tmp > sorted.tmp
> 
> and it worked as expected, but doing the same thing with filePro's
> SYSTEM command no longer works.  Here is the significant code:
> 
>        If: DOS
>      Then: TEMP1 = "C:\temp\sort.tmp"
>        If: DOS
>      Then: TEMP2 = "C:\temp\sorted.tmp"
>        If: DOS
>      Then: system noredraw "SORT" < TEMP1 < ">" < TEMP2
> 
> The file "sorted.tmp" is created, but doen't contain the redirected
> output of SORT.
> 
> Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Yeah, I -think- I have a sane one.  Use 'start' as a prefix for the whole
command.  Redirection is kind of funky in Windows, as it's reliant on the
command interpreter--which start will invoke.  If you do a straight
system() call, redirects tend not to work.  I think another part of the API
is used for that inside fP.

If 'start' prepended to the command actually works, then you're going to
get a secondary window in the interim while it "forks off" (asynchronously,
of course).  You can suppress that with one of the flags to start.  I
believe it's /B.  The start command has its own help, so it's not hard to
find.

Every time I've run into redirect issues in Windows, this has been the
silver bullet.

HTH.

mark->
-- 
"Moral cowardice will surely be written as the cause on the death
certificate of what used to be Western Civilization." --James P. Hogan