Challenge for a Rev/Unix Mac expert

[Alex Rice]

On Jan 20, 2004, at 9:58 PM, rgould8 at aol.com wrote:

> I mailed a posting a few days ago about a problem I was having with 
> Revolution when launching a unix command-line application with the 
> shell() command.  The problem I'm having is that the first time this 
> particular unix call is invoked, it requires the Mac OS X 
> authentification popup to display, which causes Revolution to hang for 
> some reason.

A gnarly problem you've got here. If your installer software can launch 
PPPSetup then I would just go with that.

I don't think it's the authentication itself that is causing Rev to 
hang. There are other problems here. (Even after authentication is 
done, the PPPSetup command hangs for me.)

PPPSetup launches a second instance of itself [1] as a subprocess- 
which apparently confuses Rev and it thinks that it has to wait for all 
processes to complete. (or maybe something weird with TTYs or signals)?

In Terminal, PPPSetup returns immediately, or waits for authentication, 
depending whether authentication has been done. Just an observation 
about it's varying behavior in behavior in normal conditions.

In Rev shell, PPPSetup always hangs no matter whether authentication 
has been done.

In applescript with the "do shell script ..." version of this command 
ALSO hangs no matter whether authentication has been done.

In Terminal I can background PPPSetup with job control & no problems.

In Rev shell I cannot background PPPSetup with job control & (even by 
writing a separate /bin/sh script to do it).

In applescript I cannot background PPPSetup with job control &

[1] I think PPPSetup is spawning other processes because I keep ending 
up with these long running processes "./PPPSetup" when the process I 
started was named "./PPPSetup m username password 7035551212" and had 
already ended.

# ps ax  | grep PPP
   535  ??  S      0:00.07 ./PPPSetup

--
Alex Rice | Mindlube Software | http://mindlube.com