Re: closing extra fd's in gnome_execute_*

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On 11 Jan 1999, Martin Baulig wrote:

> Elliot Lee <sopwith@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > On 10 Jan 1999, Martin Baulig wrote:
> > 
> > > Well, if I understand this correctly, any program expecting any other file
> > > descriptor than 0, 1 or 2 open won't work when invoked in the shell for
> > > most people (don't know - is something like `foo 5<bar' valid shell syntax?).
> > 
> > Yes. configure scripts depend on this working.
> 
> Well, is this really an issue for gnome_execute_* () ? Normally configure
> scripts are invoked in a shell like bash, the shell opens the file
> descriptors and passes them to the configure scripts - but when do one
> use gnome_execute to invoke a configure script ?

The problem occurs when a program that has many fd's open runs a shell
script. configure scripts were given as examples of programs that use a
lot of fd's and run shell scripts.

The issue is not really gnome_execute_*(). It is Manish trying to do bad,
non-scalable hacks to work around bad bash brokenness ;-)

-- Elliot
"In film you will find four basic story lines. Man versus man, man
 versus nature, nature versus nature, and dog versus vampire."
    - Steven Spielberg