Harold,
... but the true difficulty in that is communicating the assigned display number back to the shell from which XWin was launched so that X programs can know the correct display to connect to.
Why not have XWin write its display number to a file in /var/run, e.g., /var/run/XWin.$$.display, where "$$" stands for the PID of the XWin process? Since anyone who started XWin in the background from a shell script will have access to its PID via $!, the following idiom will work:
XWin -multiwindow -emulate3buttons & XWINPID=$! DISPLAY_FILE=/var/run/XWin.$XWINPID.display while [ ! -e "$DISPLAY_FILE" ]; do sleep 1; done DISPLAY="`cat "$DISPLAY_FILE"`"
Unfortunately, this approach won't work from .bat scripts (since they aren't aware of Cygwin process IDs). It also won't work if "cygstart XWin" is used. Any ideas on how to address it? Igor
Batch scripts was more of my concern... it would be possible to do from a Cygwin shell like you describe (though I did not have all of the tricks in mind).
Maybe the solution is to make the batch files just launch a shell script to do the heavy lifting... sort of cheating but if it makes it possible then it is acceptable to me.
Harold
