AutoHotkey Community

[Laszlo]

I assume you tried the original (v. 1.05), and it worked correctly. It looks like I oversimplified the code, although it works for me on two different XP SP2 machines, so I cannot find the problem. Others: does it suck on your system, too?

[evl]

Sorry, my fault, forgot I had commented out the "SetBatchLines -1" (was being cautious as an earlier version locked up a bit) - turns out that it can mess up both of the examples most of the time but fine when it's there. The SetBatchlines command should probably be inside of the CMDret_RunReturn function to make sure it doesn't get commented out or left off as it seems to be essential.

[Laszlo]

Evl is right! Without " SetBatchLines -1 " the script does not work right. This is quite surprising. Can anyone explain it?

Accordingly, we need the following in the beginning of the function code

[corrupt]

[corrupt]

[corrupt]

Although it might not be necessary at this point, I thought I'd take a minute and try and explain a bit of what the current code is doing before working on the next version. Here's the basic idea (significant parts):

1) Create a pipe. Retrieve Read and Write handles. This is used to redirect the output from the console and to buffer the data.

2) Create a process by executing a console based program and set the output to use the write end of the pipe

3) Start a loop that Peeks at the contents in the pipe.

4) Next we need to know 2 details. When the process has finished executing and when we have read all of the data from the pipe. When both of these are true we want to close our read and write handles and return the results.

4a)If the process is still running we need to keep checking the pipe to see if it has placed any output in the pipe. If it has we need to read the data from the pipe and add it to our output variable.

4b)If the process has finished we need to check the pipe for data. If there is still data in the pipe we need to read this data and add it to our output variable before leaving the function.

4c)If the process is still running but the pipe is empty we want to try and slow things down a bit to prevent the script from acting as if it is in an endless loop and using up our processor's precious time. This is the reason for the sleep value in the loop.

4d)If something goes wrong and the process is hung we want to provide a method of aborting and returning the output so far. A global variable is currently provided that contains the PID of the running process so that various methods can be used to force the function to quit without having to kill the script.

[Laszlo]

[shimanov]

Try replacing:

[Laszlo]

Thanks, Shimanov! (I did not want to hijack this thread, but...) your suggestions did not help. Without SetBatchLines -1, once in every half a dozen runs one of the outputs are still shown as empty. I moved the Sleep 0 command BEFORE the IF...Continue, and it improved the error rate to one in 50 runs. Not surprising! It did not slow down the loop before. Increasing the Sleep time to 10 gave a slight further improvement. With Sleep 50 I did not experience this error any more (tried over 1000 runs). Here is the code. I suspect, there is still something fishy in there. With SetBatchLines -1, Sleep 0 is enough.

[shimanov]

[toralf]

If I want to get the list of files from a directory that has spaces in its path, how do I call RunReturn() and pass the needed ""?

Edit: Found it:

[shimanov]

Here is another function, which may improve the reliability of reading from the pipe:

[Laszlo]

" DllCall( "FlushFileBuffers", "uint", hWrite ) " freezes the function, I can kill it only with the Task Manager. If I use instead " DllCall("FlushFileBuffers", "uint", hRead) ", it does not solve the problem, sometimes the return value is empty (No SetBatchLines, Sleep 0). I tested it with

[shimanov]

[Laszlo]