Re: some dired hints should be background jobs

[Luc Teirlinck]

John Wiegley wrote:

   Yep, that's exactly what I mean.  On some Windows shells you can use
   "start", but not all.  In fact, I don't believe there is any common
   way of backgrounding a job that gets run via shell invocation.

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

As long as MS Windows would understand the Elisp function
`start-process' and would also understand Elisp's process filter and
sentinel machinery, the command that I have privately bound to
M-RETURN in dired should work on MS windows.  (That is, launch an
asynchronous process.)  Again, I could rewrite that command to be
suitable for inclusion in emacs, if there were interest in that.  For
GNU/Linux and UNIX users the only advantage over "xpdf * &" would be
that you only get an Async buffer if there is actual output and that,
if so, you can kill that buffer without killing the process.  I
personally wrote the command because I got fed up with these empty
Async buffers popping up, but I do not know whether that necessarily
annoys other people as much as it does me.

Sincerely,

Luc.