Strongly agree – "it is elegant if it works, reliably and consistently, and does not take a lot of head-banging to develop." Such "inelegant" procedures also have the advantage of being easier to debug, or to change to meet future requirements, because they do employ a temporary file whose contents can be inspected. (And also because, "first, one step runs and runs to completion, then, the next step begins," and so on.)

In reply to Re^3: Reading output of external program without Shell by Anonymous Monk
in thread Reading output of external program without Shell by Anonymous Monk

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