[Haskell-cafe] Re: When is waitForProcess not necessary?

[Dave Bayer]

So I stared at the documentation in Control-Concurrent, learned about
finally and MVar variables, and crossed the genes from the suggestions here
to come up with

    runCommand ::  String -> String -> IO (String,Bool)
    runCommand cmd input = do
         (inp,out,err,pid) <- runInteractiveCommand cmd
         let get h = do
                    mvar <- newEmptyMVar
                    let put xs = seq (length xs) (putMVar mvar xs)
                    forkIO $ finally (hGetContents h >>= put) (put [])
                    takeMVar mvar            
         if null input then return () else hPutStr inp input
         output <- get out
         errmsg <- get err
         exit   <- waitForProcess pid
         case exit of
              ExitSuccess -> return (output,True)
              ExitFailure _ -> do
                    hPutStrLn stderr errmsg
                    return (errmsg,False)

which seems to work well; I haven't beat on it. I like the return type for
my needs, e.g. I can write

    (out,ok) <- runCommand mark doc
    if ok then write out src
         else hPutStr stderr out 

So why don't the MVar examples in this thread bracket somehow, e.g. with
finally as Control-Concurrent suggests:

    Note that we use finally from the Control.Exception module to make
    sure that the MVar is written to even if the thread dies or is killed
    for some reason.

It seems to me that this could happen, with waitForProcess doing fine, yet
the MVar never getting written. (I haven't written a test example to
exercise this.)