Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: end of file characters and open file descriptors
Message-ID: <7330@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 30 Dec 88 15:52:04 GMT
References: <1345@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 18

In article <1345@cod.NOSC.MIL> waagen@cod.nosc.mil.UUCP (Don E. Waagen) writes:
>
>   I'm trying to have two processes communicate via a pipe (stdout), like 
>
>			A | B
>
>but with a small difference.  Process A will never die (i.e. the connection 
>will never be closed).  What I would like to do is have the fread and getchar()
>calls of process B sense or think that it is seeing the pipe close (i.e. an EOF
>character returned by the calls) without closing the connection.

If you have SysV style FIFO's (named pipes) the programs can actually do the
open/close.  In any case, though, you could send an agreed-upon character
or sequence as a terminator.  Or is the real problem the stdio buffering
keeping B from seeing anything until a block is filled and flushed?  If that
is the case, just use read() and write() instead of the buffered versions.

Les Mikesell