In released software, I'm using only system so far, so won't be affected negatively. But I still haven't managed to work around the "works in win98"/"fails in winXP" problem I mentioned, and have so far avoided trying rawSystem because of the version problem. If you can offer a workaroung to the version problem, I'll try whether rawSystem is any help in my case.

I've attached a standalone rawSystem implementation that works on both 6.0.1 and 6.2 on Windows (on Unix it only works with 6.2; if you want 6.0.1 support for Unix too you'll need an extra .c file). I'd be interested to know if this helps with your win98/winXP problem; at the least it should free you from having to think about one layer of quoting.

Generally, it'd be great if working code would less often break with new releases (oh, and a portable popen2, while we're at it!-).

We try our best! Remember that patchlevel releases only fix bugs, never change interfaces, so working code should never break when moving to a new patchlevel release. Major releases can change interfaces. We also do a great deal of testing on every release, but bugs inevitably creep in, especially on platforms other than our main development platform (Linux). Which is why we're grateful for any help we can get from the community... Cheers, Simon