[fpc-pascal] POpen en PClose

[Marco van de Voort]

Op 20-7-2026 om 11:57 schreef Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal:
>>>
>>> I am looking at the implementation of POpen and PClose in the 
>>> runtime-library for Darwin (or more general for UNIX). It seems like 
>>> it doesn't call into libc popen and pclose, but instead follows its 
>>> own implementation in unix.pp in POpen_internal. I am just curious 
>>> to know the reason.
>>>
>> Phew, that was over twenty years ago, but afaik the reason is that 
>> libc popen and pclose us C FILE descriptors, which the RTL in general 
>> doesn't use to avoid a mix of functions with pascal and C file types.
>>
>> So popen/pclose are a more high level (FILE * using) part of libc, 
>> while we tend to only use the basis.
>
> Glad our memories agree on this :-) 

Well aside from the fact that FreeBSD was the architecture where the 
baseunix/unix RTL  was done. The port to Linux was only done later :-)

This shows the tension a bit between libc the system lib, and libc the C 
runtime. We are only interested in the system lib part.