Following up to myself, I found these references:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=3475
F130.80F%40us.ibm.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dwin32%2Bpopen%2Bservice%
26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3D3475F130.80F%2540us
.ibm.com%26rnum%3D1
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=5f4a
rb%24q5n%40chaos.dac.neu.edu&rnum=7&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dwin32%2Bpopen%2Bs
ervice%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3D5f4arb%2524q
5n%2540chaos.dac.neu.edu%26rnum%3D7
Seems we need to either write our own version of popen(), or we need to
do a system("whatever > somefile") and then read the file...
//Magnus
>-----Original Message-----
>
>
>Hi!
>
>Been trying to find out why things don't work well on Windows 2000. The
>closest I've come to a solution is that popen() does not work
>on windows
>2000 *when running as a service*. This isused in find_other_exec(),
>which is what pg_ctl uses to find postmaster.exe. It does
>appear to work
>fine on XP and 2003. Haven't tested NT4.
>The symptoms are popen() returning NULL, with both errno and
>GetLastError() set to 0.
>
>Anyone know *why* this doesn't work?
>
>If we don't know why, sign one more down as a bug in mingw (hardly
>surprising - just the area of pipes and consoles seems to be where it's
>weak). In that case, why not just recode pg_ctl to execute
>postmaster.exe from the same directory it found pg_ctl.exe in. This can
>easily be done using GetModuleFileName(). Is a pipe opened at any other
>place? Or does other places need to be fixed as well (I haven't gone
>through the whole code).
>
>Oh, and also - has *anybody* got the service running wit hpg_ctl as
>service wrapper on windows 2000? In that case, it's version or
>environment dependent...
>
>Thoughts?
>
>//Magnus
>
>
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