How do you get pub.freeprocess to read i/o ??

Yes, Thanks are due. I think I understand the Readline method a bit better now. (At first I thought it was completely borked, shame on me!). It is non blocking, and sits in front of a 4k buffer. In this case pretty much all the output from these commands is available at once unless as you say it is a slow machine or a lot is going on, so it is buffered immediately and readline starts to work on the buffer, but by that time the process has finished.

Fortunately Bufferpos is exposed as a field in TPipeStream so you can check that.

SuperStrict

Framework brl.standardio
Import pub.freeprocess

Local temp_process:TProcess = CreateProcess("ipconfig /?",HIDECONSOLE)
Local temp_read:String, avail:Int

Print "started"
Repeat
	' loop until data available.  In practice of course you would be doing other things.
	Repeat 
		avail = temp_process.pipe.readavail()
		If temp_process.status()=0 Then Exit
	Until avail>0

	Print "Status "+temp_process.status()
	Print "Avail "+avail
 	
	If avail=0 Then Exit

	' get available data
	Repeat
			temp_read  = temp_process.pipe.readline()

			Print temp_process.pipe.bufferpos +" read >"+temp_read

	Until temp_process.pipe.bufferpos<=0
Forever
temp_process.close()
temp_process.terminate()
temp_process = Null
Print "ended"