Re: [PATCH] fmt-merge-msg: avoid open "-|" list form for Perl 5.6

On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 12:18:19PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Christopher Faylor wrote:

quoted

If the speed of cygwin's fork is an issue then I'd previously suggested
using spawn*.  The spawn family of functions were designed to emulate
Windows functions of the same name.  They start a new process without
the requirement of forking.

I thought that cygwin didn't implement the posix_spawn*() family?

Right.  It just implements the windows version of spawn.  I looked more
closely at the posix_spawn functions after you last suggested it and,
while it would be possible to implement this in cygwin, these functions
are a lot more heavyweight than the windows-like implementation of spawn
that are already in cygwin.  So, they would come with their own
performance penalty.

The cygwin/windows version of spawn is basically like an extended version
of exec*():

pid = spawnlp (P_NOWAIT, "/bin/ls", "ls", "-l", NULL);

will start "/bin/ls" and return a pid which can be used in waitpid.
There is still some overhead to this function but it basically is just a
wrapper around the Windows CreateProcess, which means that it doesn't
go through the annoying overhead of Cygwin's fork.

The posix_spawn stuff is in my todo list but the Windows spawn stuff
could be used now.

cgf