Why (call-process ...) cannot be keyboard-quit on native NT

Nope, read() is non-blocking on Win9x, but that shouldn't stop us from devising interesting alternatives to get things working. :) Sockets are the only thing on Win32 that have non-blocking reads like Unix does. Win 9x doesn't really support asynchronous I/O for files or pipes, and NT supports overlapped I/O and I/O completion ports like a champ on files, pipes, etc... So given those annoying constraints, we can't use overlapped I/O and we can't use non-blocking I/O since it doesn't exist... :( We can however approximate non-blocking reads on pipes on NT and Win9x by making use of PeekNamedPipe(). something like the following should help lead the way: int non_blocking_pipe_read //----------------------------------------------------------- // return EWOULDBLOCK if the pipe doesn't contain any readable data // ( HANDLE hPipe, // [in] handle to the pipe UINT cbBuffer, // [in] number of bytes in the buffer UINT *pcbRead, // [in,out] number of bytes that were actually read into the buffer BYTE *pbBuffer // [in,out] buffer to copy data into ) { UINT cbAvailable = 0; if (!PeekNamedPipe(hPipe, NULL, 0, NULL, &cbAvailable, NULL)) { <error handling> } if (cbAvailable > 0) { if (cbAvailable > cbBuffer) { <error handling> } if (!ReadFile(hPipe, pbBuffer, cbAvailable, pcbRead, NULL) { <error handling> } return 0; } else { return EWOULDBLOCK; } } NOTE: This only works on pipes, you can't use it on normal files. I don't know whether or not this is an issue with the XEmacs internals are not, I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Bill