Pipes On Windows

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The following code will fail in a standard Windows compiled Lua binary, due to the fact that popen() is not supported on that platform.


c = "''some shell command''" -- e.g. 'dir'

readfrom("|" .. c) -- this part will alway fail in standard Windows compiled binary

print(read("*a"))

But there actually is a way to enable support for 'pipes' on Windows (tested with win2k and Lua 4.0)

on the lua-l David Burgess wrote:


On VC6, Lua 4.0.1

from the project menu

Goto - "Project/Settings"

Tab - "C/C++"

Select "All configurations"

Edit field - "Preprocessor definitions"



and paste at the end of the existing string

(which should already have something like "WIN32,_CONSOLE,_MBCS")

POPEN,popen=_popen,pclose=_pclose

Also tried with lcc for Windows.

You can add POPEN to the #defines on the Compiler->Settings panel.

There is an issue with _popen, however. The Win32 API documentation says that it will only work in console applications, so if you've embedded Lua in a Windows app, then that's a problem. However, there is a patch [1], and has been tested in SciTE (this also supplies a 'quiet' version of os.execute).

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Last edited July 2, 2004 5:15 pm GMT (diff)