15.7 Subprocesses

MIT/GNU Scheme provides the ability to run and control subprocesses. This support is divided into two parts: a low-level set of primitives that maps onto the underlying operating system’s process-control primitives, and a high-level set of procedures for starting a subprocess and running it to completion in a single call. Subprocesses that are run in the latter fashion are referred to as synchronous, because they are started and stopped in synchrony with a Scheme procedure call.

This chapter documents Scheme’s high-level synchronous-subprocess support. The low-level support is not documented but is available for those who are willing to read the source code.

Synchronous-subprocess support is a run-time-loadable option. To use it, execute

(load-option 'synchronous-subprocess)

once before calling it.