Pointers and spawning processes with glib

[Rupert Swarbrick <rswarbrick gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm writing something using glib's process spawning features. A silly
example of what I'm doing might look something like this:

static void
foo (const gchar* path)
{
    gboolean ret;
    gint stdout;
    gchar* argv[] = { "/usr/bin/man", "-R", "utf-8", NULL, NULL };

    argv[3] = path;

    ret = g_spawn_async_with_pipes (NULL, argv, NULL, 0, NULL, NULL,
                                    NULL, NULL, &stdout, NULL, &err);
    if (!ret) {
      // Do error handling here
    }

    // Use the file descriptor from stdout.
}

I've just been browsing through the code in glib's gspawn.c and I
*think* that, since it works by calling fork() then exec(), the strings
pointed to by argv are copied on the line with the
g_spawn_async_with_pipes() call.

My first question is, is this right? That is, am I safe to write

  g_free (path) 

just before the error-checking code, for example? (Yes, I know that
would be silly, but I want to understand what's going on :-) )

If so, I have a second question/suggestion. Should the documentation for
the async spawning functions have an explicit comment saying that the
memory is copied? Maybe developers with more experience with fork() and
exec() see that this is obvious but I, for one, didn't!

Thanks,

Rupert

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