> I know the above doesn't work, but could it be done in some other,
> hopefully portable, way? Wouldn't it speed up configure by a lot if
> we could apply it to the right sub-tasks?
>
> I was even thinking the "resident" sub-process could be a shell that
> looped over a read+switch/case expression to emulate functions, but as
> I said, I never got the I/O quite working.
<DOS advocacy mode>
Aaaarghhh! No No No! Aaaarghhh!
Let me reiterate: Aaaarghhh!
Not all systems have asynchronous subprocess, you know. If such
machinery would go in, you could kiss DJGPP support (and possibly
mingw32, cygwin, and OS/2 support as well, but I'm not sure to
what extent their shells have this sort of thing working) goodbye.
</DOS advocacy mode>
