[Gretl-devel] shell functionality on Windows

I tried some experiments on Windows today, on the sort of issue raised by Ignacio. All results were negative (i.e. nothing I tried worked). I'll have another go tomorrow. I don't mean to be defensive, but I thought I might briefly describe what I'm doing here. Usually working on gretl is a pleasure for me, but when I'm working on issues that are specific to Windows, and I have to boot Windows to test, I really wish someone were paying me the big bucks to do it. Until Ignacio (quite rightly) raised the point about gretl on Windows not waiting for tramo (started using "!") to finish before moving on, gretl had been using the relatively simple Windows function call WinExec() to handle shell commands. Like most simple Windows functions this is now deprecated by Microsoft. What you're "supposed to use" -- and what you have to use to make the caller wait for the command to complete -- is the function CreateProcess(). This is a typically monstrous Microsoft API: a function with 10 arguments, two of which are pointers to structures which between them contain 22 elements. CreateProcess() is documented in opaque, bureaucratic fashion on msdn.com. In attempting to understand how to actually use it, one googles for examples and discussion. This "helpfully" turns up various cases of Microsoft experts offering authoritative but mutually contradictory views on the "right" way to use the API -- something that one finds with most such MS APIs. So that's why it's taking a while to get this right! But I really don't want to see gretl messing with ad hoc time-waster loops to work around lack of synchronization, if I can help it. Allin.