Shell command doesn't give feedback until done

[Bill Vlahos]

I am using this command:  put shell(command()) into field "status"  
which works.

How can I solve these 2 problems?

1.    The UI is frozen until the the command completes.

2.    The "status" field isn't updated until the command completes.   
I would like to see feedback as the shell command is running.

The shell command could take a long time to run and it returns  
informational feedback during the process which would be good to  
display to the user.

The Rev documentation states:
> The value returned by the shell function is the result of the  
> commandLine, including any error messages the commandLine  
> generates. (On Unix systems, the stdout and stderr are combined to  
> create the return value.) The current handler pauses until the  
> shell returns its result. If the command was successful but did not  
> return anything, the shell function returns empty.
It looks to me like the feedback I want is not possible. Is it?

Bill Vlahos