Re: The primitiveness of pipe

[pete@minster.york.ac.uk]

Steven M Rezsutek says:

>Why stop there?  If es had $&socket, I could purge perl from the disk.
>One small feature for es, one giant bloat-purge for the system as a 
>whole.  After all, the network is the computer. ;-) Es could be the 
>first network shell...

$&socket is unnecessary. Get hold of Dan Bernstein's excellent client-server
code which implements his UCSPI (Unix Client Server Program Interface)
which will give you very nice shell-level access to internet and unix-domain
sockets, and named pipes. It takes a bit of plumbing to get things working, but
most of the lurking horrors could be taken care of by careful use of es
syntax.

You can ftp it from a number of sites. The most up to date seems to be
lysator.liu.se:/pub/daemons/clientserver-0.80-p1.tar.z (gzipped)

To date I've only used it with sh and rc, but I plan to migrate some of my
old code to es in the near future. I find Dan's system the easiest way of
presenting network services to shell scripts.

Pete
--
 *Peter Fenelon -- Research Associate -- Software Safety Assessment Procedures*
 Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York, Y01 5DD (+44 0904 433388)
 EMAIL: pete@minster.york.ac.uk `There's no room for enigmas in built-up areas'