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From: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Relying on ARP (was Re: My AmigaDOS 1.4 wishlist (one among thousands!))
Message-ID: <43867@bbn.COM>
Date: 6 Aug 89 00:30:24 GMT
References: <12878@well.UUCP> <26758@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <20904@cup.portal.com> <26915@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11107@polya.Stanford.EDU> <SHADOW.89Aug5174731@pawl.rpi.edu>
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In article <SHADOW.89Aug5174731@pawl.rpi.edu> shadow@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) writes:
}
}On 4 Aug 89 06:55:23 GMT,
}rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) said:
}
}Rokicki> I've always wanted to be able to fopen("|lpr", "w"), for
}Rokicki> instance, to spool things automatically, or anything else
}Rokicki> with pipes.  Why hasn't any operating system (that I know of)
}Rokicki> allowed file names to also specify new processes?  I mean, I
}Rokicki> can open `par:' or `ser:' or even `speak:'.  Just a thought.
}
}par:, ser: and speak: are devices, as in /dev/* under Unix.  What if
}you wanted to open a file named "|lpr"?  Besides, there's popen()...

On the other hand, if yo'd like to try it to see if you like it, you
could check out 'perl' (available for most all Unixes and the Amiga)...
it does *exactly* that it has just one 'open' call, but that one
includes in the syntax of the file name the usual shell
operation-control chars, so you don't do "r" to read, you do
"<filename"..  similarly, to do the equivalent of "popen(xxx, "w")", you
just do "open ("|xxx")".  The fact is (a) it works out to be very nice, and
very convenient, indeed, and (b) the collision with filenames with '|'
as their first char and the like turns out not to be a problem.  Unix would be
better to have fopen() work that way.

On the other hand, there is *absolutely* no reason why Tom or Deven or
me could't just write a sexyopen() that does just that.  The underlying
machinery (in Unix, at least) is all trivially there, and so sexyopen
would be a piece of cake to write.  Not so easy in AmigaDOS, I suspect...

  /Bernie\