Re: Short explanation for & in key ! of dired

[Stefan Monnier]

>> To achieve this I today have to do this in dired:
>> ! gimp ? & RET

> Speaking of Gimp, and going a bit off-topic here, can anyone explain
> why I cannot seem to run gimp-remote in the same fashion? I do this:

> ! gimp-remote ? &

> And it finishes right away without opening Gimp. The only way I can
> start it is by doing:

> ! gimp-remote

> But for some reason that locks up Emacs, although that does not happen
> if I run it from Bash.

> Is this an issue in gimp-remote, Emacs, or a combination?

My guess is that gimp-remote does a "fork&exit" and then does its task.

So "gimp-remote ? &" fails because as soon as the async process exits,
Emacs will close the pipe to that process, which is apparently kills the
forked process as well.

And inversely "gimp-remote" fails to terminate because Emacs's sync
processes wait for the proces to close stdin&stdout, but the forked
process still running doesn't close them, for some reason.

Hopefully we can make Emacs behave more like regular shells, but I don't
know enough about Unix process programming to fix it.  Any taker?


        Stefan