Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ihnp4!upba!eecae!mailrus!ames!mike
From: mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Mike Smithwick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: pipe: stuff
Keywords: put that in your pipe: and smoke it!
Message-ID: <10440@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 16 Jun 88 21:47:03 GMT
Reply-To: mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Mike Smithwick)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Lines: 36

[take a line eater to lunch]

Ok, like, ya know, I'm trying to work with this pipe device thingy, and
it's like, actin' really weird I think. . .

I want to have a little background program running all of the time 
monitoring pipe:. From time to time, stuff will be redirected to it
from cli. What is happening is this: I start up foo, the program, and
it opens pipe:, then hits "read(fd. . .", and promptly blocks (hangs).

It unblocks when I do something like "date > pipe:". After reading the
data, it seems to be in a non-blocking mode, so, when there is nothing
being sent to pipe:, the read just returns a zero. (This is what I want
all of the time.) 

Now, if I do another redirection to pipe:, like above, I get 
"CLI error : unable to open redirection file". I can correct that by
closing and reopening pipe: inside foo, but that returns me to the
blocking problem I get at startup.

So the question is, what's really happening? Am I guilty of pipe abuse
and should be sent back to flipping burgers at McDonalds, or is there 
something weird going on that I am unawares of. 


waiting on pins and needles . . .






-- 
			   *** mike (starship janitor) smithwick ***
"Being a dwarf does have it's shortcomings"
[disclaimer : nope, I don't work for NASA, I take full blame for my ideas]