[erlang-questions] Output from programs started with open_port

[黃耀賢 (Yau-Hsien Huang)]

Hi, Ulf.

The first message sent out from the C program is fed in stderr and would not
be caught by the Erlang program. In unixy system the "hello world ..."
string is printed when the Erlang process call and execute the C program,
while the later one puts those messages in stderr as representing an error
message. And in Windows those error messages are not showed when the C
program puts them into stderr.

I think that the Erlang implementation in Windows does not open as port as
direct executing it. To execute you codes in Windows, I've modified them
with another open_port statement:

Port = open_port({spawn, "main.exe"}, [{packet,1}]),

instead of the original one,

Port = open_port({spawn_executable, "./main"}, [{packet, 1}]),

and I think that it is different between open_port with spawn and one with
spawn_executable. Do you agree with me?


On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Ulf Norell <ulfn@REDACTED> wrote:

> I'm using open_port to communicate with external programs, and I'm having
> some problems with the output from these programs. The output I'm
> interested
> in is mainly debug output so I'd prefer to have it echoed to the terminal.
> The problem is that on unixy systems (Linux/Mac) newlines are treated just
> as line feeds without carriage return and on Windows I'm not getting any
> output at all.
>
> Here's a simple example:
>
> % The Erlang code
> -module(simple).
>
> -compile(export_all).
>
> test() ->
>  Port = open_port({spawn_executable, "./main"}, [{packet, 1}]),
>  receive
>    {Port, {data, [0]}} ->
>      port_close(Port)
>  end.
>
> // The external program
> #include <stdio.h>
>
> int main (void)
> {
>  fprintf(stderr, "hello\nworld\nHELLO\n\rWORLD\n\r");
>  write(1, "\1\0", 2);
>  return 0;
> }
>
> On unixy system I get
>
> 1> simple:test().
> hello
>     world
>          HELLO
> WORLD
> true
>
> and on Windows simply
>
> 1> simple:test().
> true
>
> Having to add \r's when you have the source of the external program is a
> nuisance but not the end of the world, but in many cases I don't have the
> source code of the external program and in that case the output is pretty
> much useless without proper newlines. On Windows it even worse since I
> don't
> get any output at all.
>
> Is this a known issue, and is there anything I can do about it?
>
> / Ulf
>