win32-open3

= Description This library provides an Open3.popen3 implementation for MS Windows for the Ruby 1.8.x branch.

= Prerequisites Ruby 1.8.x branch only C++ compiler (if building from source)

= Installation gem install win32-open3 # Build and install from source gem install win32-open3 --platform mingw32 # Install the binary gem

= Synopsis require 'win32/open3'

Open3.popen3('ver'){ |io_in, io_out, io_err| error = io_err.gets

if error
  puts "Error: " + error.chomp
  exit
end

puts "Result: " + io_out.readlines.last.chomp

}

= Notes This library is not supported on Windows 95, 98, or ME. This is a stripped down version of Park Heesob's win32_popen library.

= Developer's Notes This is a repackaging of Heesob's win32_popen module. The purpose of the repackaging was to create a unified API between the existing Ruby open3 library and this library.

The popen2 and posix_popen methods are not included in this release. They were originally part of the win32_popen module, but have been left out. They may be added back in at a later date.

There are a couple of differences in the Windows version for open3 (which also apply to Open4.popen4) - the mode flag and the show flag. For the mode, you can specify either 't' (text, the default) or 'b' (binary) as a second argument. For the show flag, you can specify either true or false, which will show the console window, or not, depending on the value you pass. The default is false.

= Known Issues I have noticed that this library (and others) may segfault if you are using the latest version of the Ruby one-click installer and VC++ 7.0 or later. This appears to be an issue between VC++ 6 (which the installer was built with) and VC++ 7.0. Your best solution is to either upgrade your C compiler or to rebuild Ruby from scratch rather than using the installer.

= Precompiled binaries If you do a typical "gem install win32-open3" you will get a precompiled binary appropriate for your platform. If you want to build from source, go the project page and download, download the .zip file, and run the 'install' Rake task from the command line.

= Future Plans Replace the current implementation with a pure Ruby version, if possible.

= More Documentation See the doc/open3.txt file for more details.