I have a string command I'd like to execute asynchronously while writing to its input and reading its output. Sounds easy, right, the devil is in the cross-platform. I'm targeting both MSVC/Win32 and gcc/Linux and obviously want to write the minimum amount of platform-specific code. My google-fu has failed me, I get too much noise for my queries, so I started with what I know.
popen - nice and easy, returns FILE* that is easy to consume everywhere. But here's what MSDN have to say about _popen:
If used in a Windows program, the _popen function returns an invalid file pointer that causes the program to stop responding indefinitely. _popen works properly in a console application. To create a Windows application that redirects input and output, see Creating a Child Process with Redirected Input and Output in the Platform SDK.
and so popen is out of the question (edit: because I'd like my code to work in GUI application). The Windows way to do it is in my opinion rather ugly and verbose. I could live with platform specific spawn code but I'd want at least the I/O code to be the same. Here, however, I hit a wall between the WinAPI HANDLEs and C FILE*, and int file descriptor. Is there a way to "convert" a HANDLE to FILE* or int fd or vice-versa? (Google failed me once more on this one, all the keywords I tried are way overused)
Is there better way to do the whole thing with little platform-specific code?
External libraries are not out of the question, however dependency maintenance is a pain, especially so on multiple platforms so I'd like to reduce dependencies. I didn't find such library in boost also.
Just for the record, what worked for me in the end. On Windows/MSVC, Create