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SpawnSourceMini spawn library
Note: on Unix, spawn uses vfork by default. It has been tested, but if you believe this is causing a problem in your application, you can change this default at runtime by setting the environment variable SPAWN_USE_FORK.
val spawn :
?env:Env.t ->
?cwd:Working_dir.t ->
prog:string ->
argv:string list ->
?stdin:Unix.file_descr ->
?stdout:Unix.file_descr ->
?stderr:Unix.file_descr ->
?unix_backend:Unix_backend.t ->
?setpgid:Pgid.t ->
?sigprocmask:(Unix.sigprocmask_command * int list) ->
unit ->
intSpawn a sub-command and return its PID. This function is low-level and should be used to build higher-level APIs.
In case of errors, it raises Unix.Unix_error.
Binary
prog is not searched in PATH. It is up to the caller to do the path resolution before calling this function. Note that there is no special treatment of executable text files without a proper #!. The execvp function from the C library calls /bin/sh in this case to imitate the behaviors of a shell but this function doesn't.
Note that when prog is a relative filename, it is interpreted as a path relative to the working directory specified by the cwd argument. On Windows, this differs from what the underlying CreateProcess function does.
Command line arguments
argv is the full command line. The first element should be the program name and subsequent elements the command line arguments. Note that the head of argv doesn't necessarily have to be equal to prog. For instance it might be foo while prog might be /usr/bin/foo.
Environment
env represents the environment in which the sub-process is executed. If not specified, the environment from the process calling this function is used.
Working directory
cwd describes what the current working directory of the sub-process should be. It defaults to Inherit. It is an error to pass Fd _ on Windows.
Standard input/outputs
stdin, stdout and stderr are the file descriptors used as standard input, output and error output of the sub-process. When not specified, they default to the ones from the calling process.
Process groups
If setpgid is provided, the child will immediately call setpgid(0,pid), where pid is a pid_t determined from the Pgid.t given (see that module). This parameter has no effect on Windows platforms.
Signals
On Unix, by default, the sub-process will have all its signals unblocked. If sigprocmask is passed, the sub-process will have its sigprocmask modified with the given sigprocmask_command, relative to the calling thread. At no point will any OCaml function observe any intermediate signal mask.
Attempts to unblock a signal that is not blocked, to block a signal that is already blocked, or to block a signal that cannot be blocked (e.g., SIGSTOP, SIGKILL) are allowed and will be silently ignored.
Implementation
unix_backend describes what backend to use on Unix. If set to Default, vfork is used unless the environment variable SPAWN_USE_FORK is set. On Windows, CreateProcess is used.