[Newbies] Re: Executing an external program

[David T. Lewis]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 08:59:46AM +0200, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
> David T. Lewis a ?crit :
> >
> >There is not (yet) a general cross-platform solution. If you can explain
> >what kind of program you are trying to run, maybe I can give a suggestion.
> 
> Thanks for for  your feedback.
> 
> I want to run the espeak program for speech synthesis. Basically I just 
> want to run a command like:
> 
> espeak "Speech a few word"
> 
> or
> 
> espeak "Speech a few word" -w output.wav
> 
> In the first case, it may be better if the command is executed in non 
> blocking mode for Squeak.
> In the second mode a blocking mode may be better, or even semaphore will 
> be helpful.

Hilaire,

OSProcess will work well for this. When you run an external program, it
gives you a "process proxy" in Squeak the keeps track of the run state of
the external program, as well as exit status after the program completes.
However, as I said this is not cross-platform. It will work on Linux and
Unix, and will work on Mac OSX if you install the plugin from unix/linux.
It will also work on Windows, but only if you build your own VM and
modify some of the Windows platform source, so this is definitely not
for beginners ;) So on, Windows, it is best to use FFI (but I don't think
you can have a blocking mode with this).

HTH,

Dave