start process with commandline arguments

Hi,

is there a max object to start a shell process with commandline arguments?

Maybe even read/write from stdio? (That is not mandatory but would be nice)

Or can this be done using javascript inside max?

Background:
I wanna use graphwiz to create some graph view images to include in the gui. I would like to make the generated graph images react on clicks. (This should be easily to achieve using imagemap which is supported by max and i hope max and graphwiz share the same imagemap definition ;)

Other things which could be usefull: a) a xml dom library b) a xslt transform c) support for max objects interacting with the html site viewed in max' webbrowser. (call javascript functions, read and modify html elements etc)

I'd like to avoid going to c and writing a max object for this. But maybe someone can forward me to a hello-world-max-object written in c?

Any tips or thoughts welcome! Thanks!