Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!decwrl!mcnc!uvaarpa!mmdf
From: marc@athena.mit.edu (Marc Horowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: read/write pipe
Message-ID: <1991Feb23.202950.22171@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 23 Feb 91 20:29:50 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: marc@mit.edu
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 15

I know this has been mentioned here before, but I don't remember what
the reasons were.  Why is open(FOO,"|cat|") (a pipe to a program which
I can read from and write to) not supported?  If a patch were to land
in your mailbox, Larry, would you consider taking it?  If so, I might
consider writing it.

The reason I want this is because I have a remote database server, and
a client which accepts "operation arg1 arg2 ..." as input, and gives
whitespace separated fields as a response.  I'd like to open a pipe to
this process so I can write queries and read back responses.  For now,
I can use pipe, fork, and exec, but having this functionality in open
is a lot more elegant, even if it isn't necessarily portable (like to
MS-DOS).

		Marc