Runtime.exec() implementation

[Andrew Haley]

Archie Cobbs writes:
 > I wrote an implementation of Runtime.exec() (including a new class
 > java.lang.VMProcess which extends java.lang.Process and native code)
 > for JC. This can be easily merged into Classpath if people want it.
 > It seems like a pretty glaring omission.
 > 
 > This uses the usual Unix functions of fork(), exec(), waitpid(), etc.
 > and should be as portable as the existing native code.  I'd have to
 > rewrite my JCNI native code in JNI but that would be easy.
 > 
 > Let me know if people are interested.

This sounds good.  However, the precise implementation of this class
is very delicate and error-prone, and we found a number of bugs in
gcj's implementation.  The trouble is that our bugs were only noticed
after some time.  I guess you may write fewer bugs than we did, but
there still might be one or two in yours.  :-)

Would you be interested in having a look at the libgcj implementation
and comparing?  Rather than having to download or check out all of
libgcj, I could just send you the few files.

Andrew.