Alberto writes:

Hi :) , I am creating a tiny app in Haskell to search for a directory in the tree and change the current shell directory just to learn to program better in Haskell and I've always used the Win/Hugs98 interpreter but I've just moved to FreeBSD/NHC98 because I want binary code and the thing is I can't find a function in NHC98 to make a pipe to comunicate with the shell (csh in my case) and that's the question: are the FreeBSD pipes functionality available in NHC98? By the way, can one make arbitrary System Calls in NHC98 by any means? if no, how can I change the shell's current directory?

The standard Directory library http://www.haskell.org/onlinelibrary/directory.html probably has all the functions you require. It does not include pipes, but perhaps you don't really need them. To make arbitrary system calls, you can use the standard Foreign Function Interface (FFI) http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi/ Any function from C can be "foreign import"ed into Haskell land, provided there is a method defined to convert values from one language's representation to the other (to "marshal" them). All the basic types already have marshalling functions, and it is relatively easy to write new marshalling code for more complex structs and so on. Regards, Malcolm