On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 03:26:04PM +0100, Neal H Walfield wrote: > > This is not something that can be done this way in Unix, so a program would > > not expect it to work the way it is written above, so in the Unix world this > > is not a useful feature to have. > > Try this: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~ (0)$ mkfifo foo
I realize that a fifo is what you would use under Unix. But even with a fifo you don't expect that what you write is different from what you read, so there is little point in trying what I wrote in my mail, a write on a file descriptor followed by a read on the very same descriptor. Consequently, fifos and pipes are used to carry data from one program to another. In some sense, the run translator is acting as a bidirectional pipe to a program on the other end, so it encapsulates the complexity of creating pipes, forking, dup'ing the file descriptors and execing the backend. However, bidirectional pipes are non-standard, so you can't really use them in portable software. Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
