Windows specific

These functions are only supported on POSIX platforms, as the Windows operating systems do not provide the ability to overwrite the current process image with another. In single-threaded programs it is possible to approximate the effect of execv* by using spawnProcess and terminating the current process once the child process has returned. For example:

auto commandLine = [ "program", "arg1", "arg2" ];
version (Posix)
{
    execv(commandLine[0], commandLine);
    throw new Exception("Failed to execute program");
}
else version (Windows)
{
    import core.stdc.stdlib : _Exit;
    _Exit(wait(spawnProcess(commandLine)));
}

This is, however, NOT equivalent to POSIX' execv*. For one thing, the executed program is started as a separate process, with all this entails. Secondly, in a multithreaded program, other threads will continue to do work while the current thread is waiting for the child process to complete.

A better option may sometimes be to terminate the current program immediately after spawning the child process. This is the behaviour exhibited by the __exec functions in Microsoft's C runtime library, and it is how D's now-deprecated Windows execv* functions work. Example:

auto commandLine = [ "program", "arg1", "arg2" ];
version (Posix)
{
    execv(commandLine[0], commandLine);
    throw new Exception("Failed to execute program");
}
else version (Windows)
{
    spawnProcess(commandLine);
    import core.stdc.stdlib : _exit;
    _exit(0);
}