Hi folks, this is my first post to this list, so I hope I'll include enough information to make it useful. I'd like to write a class with the following interface: class Process { public: Process(const std::vector<std::string> &args); std::string readEverythingReceivedSoFar(); void write(const std::string &data); private: something childProcess; }; and when looking for building blocks to use, I came across the process library in boost's sandbox [1]. On a first sight, it looks great and implements much more than what I need now, and has a nice documentation -- so far so good. But when I actually tried to use it, I wasn't able to get it working without resorting to something which is an ugly hack to me. It's obvious that I have to have some access to "the child process" from the reading/writing methods, and -- because I don't like leaving zombie processes behind me -- also from my destructor to be able to kill it. In this library, there's a boost::process::child which is intended to be used for exactly this purpose, so I tried to add that as that "something" member. For technical reasons (got to do some postprocessing to the user-supplied arguments before I actually launch my process), I can't initialize the childProcess in the initializer list before the actual constructor body, which means that the compiler will have to initialize it to something for me. It turns out that the boost::process::child class is missing a default constructor, so my member can't be of that type (unless I wanted to create a very artificial instance with a faked PID, fabricated FDs etc). So I had to use pointers for that, which is IMHO bad because it needs dynamic memory allocation without a real reason. I realize that we're talking about a fork() here, so a dynamic memory allocation is not a problem from the performance point of view, but I prefer not to use it unless I have to. The only solution I could come up is the following: private: std::tr1::shared_ptr<boost::process::child> childProcess; and in the constructor: childProcess.reset(new boost::process::child(boost::process::launch(exe, arguments, ctx))); ...because I get a boost::process::child by value, so I have to invoke a copy constructor and put that object on the heap, if I understand this issue correctly. That smells fishy. So, I'd highly appreciate if you could tell me whether my understanding is correct, and if there's a better way out of here. In case I missed something obvious, I'd be very happy to learn about that, too. With kind regards, Jan [1] `svn co http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/process/` -- Trojita, a fast e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/