system() waits for child to return, even when using & about slim

[grahamgower]

I note that in section 14.8 of the SLiM manual, there is a request for a Linux user to contribute a way to "open" a pdf with the default pdf viewer. The canonical way to do this on Linux is with the xdg-open command. However, this is a blocking command (unlike open on MacOS), and so would need to be run in the background.

[grahamgower]

As a workaround, one may prefix the command with coproc, which is a bash builtin. But this only works when bash is the shell. I don't know of a portable way to do this.

system("coproc sleep 5");
print("system returned");

[bhaller]

I've just committed a fix to the master branch on GitHub. There is now a "wait" parameter to system, T by default but if F is supplied then the command is run in the background by appending an &. You can append an & yourself, which should produce the same result, so your example of system("sleep 5 &"); should now run in the background without a wait on its completion. Let me know if you see any problems with this. And re: recipe 14.8, I would very much appreciate it if you would submit (via email or an issue) the exact Eidos code needed to adapt the model to Linux. Thanks!