Alain: That's good because I don't want to buy PC
hardware, that's for sure.
MP0werd: Actually, buying a cheap 486 PC to run linux is not a bad idea.
Linux doesn't need much to run, you certainly aren't gonna be using it for
it's graphics and sound capabilities, so why not?
MP0werd: On a side note, if you like scripting
languages like perl and TCL, you'll like linux,
because it has these kinds of languages within the
installation, and it has powerful tools like grep to
work with regexp.
Alain: Are you (merely) saying that Perl is installed
with Linux, or are you saying that the Linux OS is
scriptable in Perl? The latter is much more
interesting of course, especially when it comes to
developing value-added software solutions.
MP0werd: I'm saying that it comes with PERL in the installation, so you can
do pretty powerful things, like pipe the results of a search through a perl
script to filter stuff. There are lots of PERL hacks in alt.hackers, too bad
I don't know PERL.
>Alain: Does Linux provide for inter-application
>communication? You know, something similar in effect
>to AppleEvents and the Open Scripting Architecture
>that encompasses it.
I'm not that deep into the mechanics of Linux. At least in the early days,
linux did not have inter application communication like AppleEvents, although
it did have what is called signals. POSIX (linux, unix, xenix, you name it)
compliant apps listen for the signals (maybe instruct the OS to reactivate
them when they recieve a signal) and then act on the signal. This is called
catching the signal. The other method of communication is through pipes.
Everything is a file to a POSIX program, the screen, the keyboard,
everything. When you run a POSIX program, the keyboard becomes standard
input, and the screen is standard output. When you pipe two commands (or an
application creates a pipe), one application's standard output becomes the
other application's standard input. This allows for a lot of cool stuff, and
I'm sure that there's some other form of inter-app communication that I don't
know about.
Alain: I am genuinely interested in Linux and Apache.
My partner has been pestering to adopt these
technologies for some time now. They are open-source.
They apparently perform quite well. Thank you for the
information that has been provided so far, and keep it coming!
MP0werd: Hopefully I havn't overloaded you with information.
