windvi 0.62pre1

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 8 Mar 1999, Fabrice POPINEAU wrote:

> There is a big problem going on with win9x
> misbehaving wrt system() call. Namely, running an external command
> with system(), and win9x fails to return the exit code of the command.

That's a known misfeature of COMMAND.COM: it doesn't return the exit code 
to its parent.

The only real solution known to me is to not call COMMAND.COM.  In other 
words, write a replacement for `system' that parses the command line, 
does the redirection and pipes itself, and invokes programs directly, via 
`spawnXX' or some such.  This is what the DJGPP library does.

This is a lot of work, of course (although the sources of DJGPP are free
to read and hack).  However, since the command lines used by mktex*
programs are relatively simple (e.g., they don't use redirection and
pipes, I think), perhaps you could write a simple replacement for those
cases only?