Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-vax!qix
From: qix@mit-vax.LCS.MIT.EDU (Ed Puckett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Is there a preferred way to do popen()?
Message-ID: <4574@mit-vax.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Aug 88 20:06:42 GMT
References: <618@super.ORG>
Organization: MIT LCS, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 26

In article <618@super.ORG>, rminnich@metropolis.super.org (Ronald G Minnich) writes:
> Those of you who looked at the ucompat.c file i shipped out last week
> probably noticed that among others popen was a no-op. I have not
> the faintest idea of how to make this work on Amigados without bringing
> in P:, PIPE:, or some other non-standard hack. 
>    Am i missing something? Is there a way to do popen(), within the
> bounds of a straight workbench 1.2?
> ron
How about going through the clipboard.device?  I have never done
anything with it, so the following is just speculation....

Leafing through the RKM some time after writing P:, I noticed how the
clipboard would allow "clips" (or whatever that term is) could be
posted in such a way that data were not actually written, but instead
a message would be sent to the poster when any of the data were later
read.  Then the poster would have to write the data.

This seems like a good substrate for a pipe, which is really nothing
more than a bounded-sized queue whose I/O blocks when it's full/empty.

Since I've never worked with the clipboard.device, I may have totally
misunderstood its capabilities.  But if this would work, it would
seem like the right approach to pipes.  Since the underlying format
is IFF, more than just text could be shipped around, too.

			-Ed Puckett.