The OpenEdge Hive

WinExec is often found in old examples for Visual Basic. It's old... don't use it!
In Windows 3.x you would have used the WinExec procedure to run a program. The procedure is still around in Windows but it is obsolete, you should use CreateProcess or ShellExecute instead. In fact, WinExec itself is nothing but a wrapper to CreateProcess.
Note that WinExec from "krnl386.exe" (the 16 bit version) can not execute a 32-bit program, while WinExec from "kernel32.dll" (the 32 bit version) can't execute a 16-bit program.
So if you are running a Progress version less than 8.2 on Windows 95+, you may end up using two different versions of WinExec (the regular 16-bits version and a thunked 32-bits version).
(Also if you want to call a 16-bit program in Progress 8.2, but that is something you should not want to do!)
The WinExec procedure does not let you control the default directory.
If all these problems don't apply to you, you will find WinExec easy to use. Here is how you call it:

  {windows.i}
  DEFINE VARIABLE hTask AS INTEGER NO-UNDO.
  RUN WinExec IN hpApi( "notepad.exe c:\readme.txt", 1, OUTPUT hTask).
  IF hTask>=0 AND hTask<32 THEN
     MESSAGE "failed" VIEW-AS ALERT-BOX.

Explanation

The second parameter is the CmdShow parameter, the most commonly used values are:
* hidden = 0
* normal = 1
* minimized = 2
* maximized = 3

The output parameter is a handle to the task that WinExec created. According to API documentation this value should be greater than 31. But since it is an unsigned integer and gets casted into a signed Progress integer, it may occur that a valid very large value will seem to be less than 0. Values 0 to 31 represent a documented error status.