Running external program from a D program [D2]

[Jonathan M Davis]

Okay, I'm looking to be able to run an external program from within my D 
program. The library functions for this appear to be in std.process. You 
have system() and various versions of execv(). system() makes a call in 
shell. execv() executes the program without a shell.

What I'd _like_ to be able to do is run the program without a shell so that 
I don't have to worry about escaping special characters in file names, and I 
want to have access to the output from the program. This poses two problems.

1. Is there a way to run a program without the shell and without the call 
terminating the program (per bugzilla 3158, execv takes over your program 
and terminates it when it's done, in spite of what the documentation says - 
it's certainly been killing my programs when I've tried)? The only way that 
I see to do that at the moment is to spawn a separate thread and run execv 
in it. I'd prefer to just make the call and wait for it to return. Is there 
a way to do so?

2. Is there a way to get at what the called program sends to stdout? I'm 
afraid that I don't have a clue how to get at that.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

- Jonathan M Davis