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Calling external binary files without freezing Virtuoso

DeyanLevski

Good day everyone,

I am trying to call calibre from within Virtuoso using the following procedures:

           runCalDRC = strcat("calibre -drc -cb " drcRunDir "/drc_rules.rul &")

           procedure(calibreFinished(ipcId status)
           printf("Calibre run finished\n")
           )

           procedure(calibreOutput(ipcId data)
           printf("Calibre output: %L\n" data)
           )

           procedure(calibreRunDRC(runCalDRC)
            let((ipcId)
                ipcId=ipcBeginProcess(runCalDRC "" 'calibreOutput 'calibreOutput 'calibreFinished)
                )
           )

However calling Calibre using the above way freezes Virtuoso and makes it unsuitable to work on while Calibre is running. I read that one needs to use asynchronous process handling using the ipcBatchProcess() functions, however the following also freezes Virtuoso on my side. I also tried calling Calibre using csh() and system() but both still lead to Virtuoso freezing until the Calibre process was stopped. Perhaps I am calling the Calibre process not in an asynchronous way.

Could anyone give a hint on how one can correctly call an external binary in parallel with running virtuoso? And not freezing the virtuoso process of course.

Kind Regards,
Deyan

Parents Reply Children
  • in reply to Andrew Beckett

    Strangely ipcWait is nowhere to be found in my code.

  • in reply to DeyanLevski

    Perhaps another strange behaviour I observe is that the Calibre output log does not show in the CIW window until the Calibre process ends.

  • in reply to DeyanLevski

    I can't see any reason why this would hang. I have tried the code running something which produces output and then sleeps - and that doesn't hang Virtuoso. 

    The reason why the output doesn't appear until the end may be because the output is buffered and the buffer doesn't fill up until later; either way though I can''t see why it would block - the IPC functions used in this way should be completely non-blocking. Perhaps you should contact customer support.

    Andrew

  • in reply to Andrew Beckett

    Hi Andrew,

    Thanks for your help. I managed to solve the issues I was having and I can confirm for everyone else - the procedures above do work as expected and do not hang Virtuoso.

    The reason I had issues with hanging was quite simple and heavily overlooked from my side - I have quite convoluted procedures where one calls another, which then decides to call calibre with different options. In one of the main wrapper functions I was calling calibre using csh() which slipped away my checks and this was causing virtuoso hang as expected.

    Thanks a lot for your prompt help.

    Deyan

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