Description

This library provides an Open3.popen3 implementation for MS Windows for
the Ruby 1.8.x branch.

Prerequisites

Ruby 1.8.x branch only
C++ compiler (if building from source)

Installation

gem install win32-open3                    # Build and install from source
gem install win32-open3 --platform mingw32 # Install the binary gem

Synopsis

require 'win32/open3'

Open3.popen3('ver'){ |io_in, io_out, io_err|
  error = io_err.gets
  if error
    puts "Error: " + error.chomp
    exit
  end
  puts "Result: " + io_out.readlines.last.chomp
}

Notes

This library is not supported on Windows 95, 98, or ME.
This is a stripped down version of Park Heesob's win32_popen library.

Developer’s Notes

This is a repackaging of Heesob's win32_popen module. The purpose of the
repackaging was to create a unified API between the existing Ruby open3
library and this library.
The popen2 and posix_popen methods are not included in this release. They
were originally part of the win32_popen module, but have been left out.
They may be added back in at a later date.
There are a couple of differences in the Windows version for open3 (which
also apply to Open4.popen4) - the mode flag and the show flag.  For the
mode, you can specify either 't' (text, the default) or 'b' (binary) as a
second argument. For the show flag, you can specify either true or false,
which will show the console window, or not, depending on the value you
pass.  The default is false.

Known Issues

I have noticed that this library (and others) may segfault if you are using
the latest version of the Ruby one-click installer and VC++ 7.0 or later.
This appears to be an issue between VC++ 6 (which the installer was built
with) and VC++ 7.0. Your best solution is to either upgrade your C
compiler or to rebuild Ruby from scratch rather than using the installer.

Precompiled binaries

If you do a typical "gem install win32-open3" you will get a precompiled
binary appropriate for your platform. If you want to build from source,
go the project page and download, download the .zip file, and run the
'install' Rake task from the command line.

Future Plans

Replace the current implementation with a pure Ruby version, if possible.

More Documentation

See the doc/open3.txt file for more details.