Sorting filePro Arrays

[Fairlight]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:44:07PM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Jay Ashworth cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 08:42:29PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> > > The file "sorted.tmp" is created, but doen't contain the redirected
> > > output of SORT.
> 
> Wow.  I misread that; you're *getting* the file, but no contents? 

Huh.  I misread it exactly the same way, apparently.

> Odd.

Agreed.  Unless...the file was left over from a manual call and then just
-seemed- to be there after an automated call from processing.

> I might be wrong, but I thought that SYSTEM *did* *explicitly* call
> the command interpreter, and (separately) that it was the programs
> themselves that did redirection, similarly to how they do command line
> parsing themselves.
> 
> No?

I know the *nix versions' SYSTEM uses system(2), and thus calls /bin/sh.

The Windows versions...I'm not sure how fP is coded to handle that.  I do
know I've had issues like this that seem to indicate that unless you
explicitly call the command interpreter, you lose redirect functionality.
I can't remember if it was perl or fP (or both) that had this problem, but
I know the gotcha exists.  

No, the programs don't do the redirection themselves.

> > 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.
> 
> Sure, but how would he then *wait* for it to finish?

Semaphore file indicating completion, polling EXISTS loop.

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