The function can be used to start a program synchronous and asynchronous mode as well. When the timeout value passed to the function is zero the function starts the new process, but does not wait it to finish, but raises an error. In this case the BASIC program can catch this error using the ON ERROR GOTO structure and get the pid of the started process from the variable pid_v. In this case the function does not "return" any value because a BASIC error happened. For example:
ON ERROR GOTO NoError
a = EXECUTE("ls",0,PID)
NoError:
print "The program 'ls' is running under the pid: ",PID,"\n"
If the argument time_out is -1 the function will wait for the subprocess to finish whatever long it takes to run. For example:
a = EXECUTE("ls",-1,PID)
print "ls was executed and the exit code was:",a
Note that the string passed as first argument containing the executable program name and the arguments (the command line) should not contain zero character (a character with ASCII code 0) for security reasons. If the command line string contains zero character an error is raised.