Re: Async commands in M-x compile

[Antoine Levitt]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> writes:

> () Antoine Levitt <address@hidden>
> () Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:43:49 +0200
>
>    Can someone explain to me why compile doesn't support
>    asynchroneous commands, and especially why it silently
>    fails instead of displaying an error message? I don't
>    understand the mechanism involved here.
>
>    As a test, try M-x compile with
>    "echo test > ~/test &" or "xclock &".
>
> I think you mean to ask for "background" (job control) support.
> M-x compile is already asynchronous.
>
> If you want to the child process to not exit after it places
> its own children processes in the background, you need to
> tell it to ‘wait’, e.g.:
>
>   M-x compile
>   xclock & wait
>
> Note that if you kill the *compilation* buffer, or interrupt
> (via ‘C-c C-k’ aka ‘kill-compilation’) the child process,
> most likely all of its children will likewise terminate.
> Details depend on shell used and how that is initialized.
>
> thi

I should have been clearer. I really want to start a background job,
but the job doesn't start: when I do xclock &, it just returns without
starting xclock. "xclock & wait" works fine (so does "xclock" for that
matter), but the point is I don't want to wait for the process to
finish.