RE: exec.basic - comments please

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sounds good  - now let's see the code ;)

Ian.

-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Mal Lansell
Sent: 26 October 2005 15:47
To: ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_xpl] exec.basic - comments please

Following up the talk of an xPLExec application for launching arbitrary
executables, I propose the following schema:

xpl-cmnd
exec.basic
{
pid=num       //integer identifier (<2^32)
program=""    //executable filename (without path)
path=""       //path to exe (optional)
path=""       //as many as needed
args=""       //program command line argument (optional)
args=""       //as many as needed
}

xpl-stat
exec.basic
{
pid=num       //same integer as sent in the xpl-cmnd
status=[Failed][Started][Finished]
return=""     //extended info if status is failed or finished
}

The pid is a program ID - it is not the same as the Windows Process ID, but
is a user specified number to enable status messages to be associated with
commands from xPLHal without having to match the entire message body.  If
only one program is spawned at a time, then feel free to just set it to the
same value every time if you like.

Program is the name of the executable file to run, without any path.

As many or as few (none is ok) Path and Arg elements can be included as
needed.

Each Path item must contain only one piece of the path with no / or \.
These will be inserted by the receiving application.

Each Arg item must contain only one command line argument.

The xPLExec application will attempt to spawn the executable, and will
respond with a status messages containing either status=failed or
status=started.  If status=failed, then the return item will be set to one
of the following values:

"argument list too long"
"invalid argument"
"program not found"
"program not executable"
"out of memory"

If the program runs fine, the an xpl-stat message with status=started will
be sent.  When the spawned program terminates, another xpl-stat message
will
be sent, this time with status=finished, and the return item set to the
return value from the spawned program.

Windows spawn functions also support specifying a set of environment
variables, but I couldn't see a good way of including those in the schema,
with all their potential oddball characters.  Hopefully that will not be
too
much of a restriction.

Comments would be appreciated.

Mal