On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 05:49:21PM EDT, Bob McGowan wrote: <snip>
> Further processing would then need be done on the string to break it up > into pieces, or not, as dictated by the needs of the caller. My 'child > | read a b c d' is a quick way to read in the multiple lines output by > your method, or to break a long line up on any white space characters. > Without using the arrays suggested by another poster, which may not be > supported by all versions of Bourne type shells. I was vaguely hoping bash's arrays might be passed to the child via a pointer.. found out this wasn't the case. That's how I ran into the array trick mentioned in my earlier post. My take on this is that if you have to go through such contortions to pass data back from a child to a parent .. you've either chosen the wrong strategy or (more likely) the wrong programming language in the first place. Thanks, cga -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]