An Allegro CL patch is now available that provides better integration
between Lisp and native operating system resources. See
http://www.franz.com/support/tech_corner/index.lhtml#osi_patch
for the details.
The motivation for this new facility was twofold:
1. Remove as many foreign function definitions from our own (internal
and external) utilities as possible, where those foreign
definitions were related to system calls and C library routines.
We are about to release a new version of our FTP server that uses
this new module. The source code for it is about 1/3 smaller than
it was before. It will also run on more than just Solaris and
Linux (though not all UNIX platforms we support due to some
features being missing).
2. Add higher-level subprocess manipulation primitives. For years, we
have been using programs built upon ``run-shell-command'' (the
Allegro CL way of running a subprocess). We felt it was time to
publish them. There are some examples of this on the web page
referenced above.