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From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Portable inter process communications.
Message-ID: <5301@ncoast.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Nov-87 18:16:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ncoast.5301
Posted: Fri Nov  6 18:16:43 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Nov-87 04:05:39 EST
References: <143@tic.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.unix.questions
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 22
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.questions:4851 comp.unix.wizards:5395

As quoted from <143@tic.UUCP> by ruiu@tic.UUCP (Dragos Ruiu):
+---------------
| I hate to open this can of worms....
| 	Is there a *portable* way to get two processes to communicate, some
| method that has a hope of working under SysV, BSD, HP-UX and the plethora of
| weird beasties in Unix land ? Are named pipes the answer ? Are files the last
| resort ?
|  
|      Barring that is there a method that will work on all SysV (V.2 V.3 ..)?
+---------------

Named pipes (FIFOs) work in System III and System V.  Under 4.xBSD, you can
get the equivalent of a named pipe by getting a socketpair and calling bind()
to attach it to a filename.  (Think of bind() as flink(), i.e. link a file
descriptor into the filesystem; but it only works on sockets, I believe.)
This would allow an ALMOST-portable technique, since the only machine
depent code is to do a mknod(name, ...|S_IFIFO) under USG or socket() and
bind() under BSD.
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery		     necntc!ncoast!allbery@harvard.harvard.edu
 {harvard!necntc,well!hoptoad,sun!mandrill!hal,uunet!hnsurg3}!ncoast!allbery
Moderator of comp.sources.misc