Re: some dired hints should be background jobs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: John Wiegley <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2003 17:00:01 -0700
> 
> > I know so little about MS Windows (I use GNU/Linux) that I do not
> > really understand the above.  Do you mean we could not make "xpdf *
> > &" the default because MS Windows does not understand & and hence
> > it would not be portable?  Does MS Windows have a notion of job
> > control?  It must have a notion of asynchronous command since it is
> > a windowing system.
> 
> Yep, that's exactly what I mean.  On some Windows shells you can use
> "start", but not all.

Which ones don't support `start'?  AFAIK, all of them do.

> In fact, I don't believe there is any common
> way of backgrounding a job that gets run via shell invocation.

Actually, I think this is the default on Windows: a GUI program
always opens its own window, and the shell that invoked it doesn't
wit for it.  If not, you could use `start'.

> This could mean that "&" is just a UNIX(ish) thing.

That's true in the sense that the "&" syntax is not understood by
stock Windows shells.