Win 98 support patch

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Jul-2003, Paul Kienzle <address@hidden> wrote:

| The attached patch removes some major inconveniences when running
| under Windows 9x.  Simple commands like ls or help would freeze
| the computer for 7 sec then give a series of dire warnings about
| each loaded oct-file.
| 
| As far as I can tell, the patch doesn't remove any useful
| functionality.

What about not being able to get the actual PID of the subprocess?
Perhaps we never use that anywhere?

| The correct status is still returned function calls.  Interrupts still
| break the piped application rather than killing octave.  Killing the
| pager still leaves the keyboard echo turned off in the console, only to
| be fixed by system('reset').  Octave still responds appropriately if it
| detects that gnuplot has been killed (which BTW it may not since pgnuplot
| doesn't die when the gnuplot console is closed).  This is despite the
| fact that SIGCHLD isn't being handled correctly (SIGCHLD should use
| default signal handling rather than doing it's own waits if popen is
| in effect according to the docs --- this may not be the case for
| octave_iprocstream under unix), and despite that fact that the
| buffered child cleanup function is not being called (though I didn't
| look in detail at what child cleanup is needed for pager/gnuplot).

OK.  I'm not sure what is correct for handling SIGCHLD.

| I haven't removed the fork in system('cmd','async').  In practice,
| users can say system('cmd &') instead, so it isn't too much of an
| issue.

But can they still get the PID of the subprocess?  OTOH, I think that
you actually get the PID of the shell process anyway, so I'm not sure
how useful that is.

In any case, I've installed your changes.

jwe