[Haskell-cafe] System.Process

[Andrew Coppin]

Much hair-pulling resulted today when I attempted to perform a small task.

The System.Process module provides the runCommand function. This takes a 
complete command line and returns a ProcessHandle. No problem there.

The module also provides the runProcess function, which enables you to 
set environment variables and so forth. However... this doesn't take a 
complete command line. It takes a path to an executable and a list of 
parsed arguments.

Herein lies the problem: I have a program that accepts complete commands 
from a file and executes them. It works perfectly. And now I'd just like 
to set an environment variable while each command runs... But alas no, 
the only way to do that is with runProcess, which expects me to parse 
the command line first. (Before anybody remarks that "words" will do 
this, consider the "echo" command, which treats whitespace meaningfully.)

In the end I resorted to reading the source code for the module. After 
about 30 minutes of hacking, I got something which typechecks but throws 
a runtime exception. It appears that runCommand looks for binaries in 
the system search path, but the code I've concocted doesn't. (Despite 
being cut and pasted from the definition of runCommand.) The only thing 
I can think of is that the source code I'm looking at (GHC 6.8.3) is 
different from the version of the library I have (GHC 6.8.1).

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get to is... would it be hard for 
however maintains this library to add a little more flexibility in what 
it can do please?