From: Tom Pollard <tomp@...>
Date: 2006-11-20T22:18:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Reading from a named pipe


On Nov 17, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Paul Lutus wrote:
> Named pipes are opened and read or written as though they were files
> (streams). Just open it by path and name.
>
>> The two programs are running under Windows XP, btw.
>
> Are you asking how to create the named pipe? That is an operating  
> system
> function, and frankly, I don't know if Windows supports them. The  
> operating
> system must support the idea of a named pipe, and if it doesn't, no  
> named
> pipe.

Windows also has named pipes, but they behave somewhat differently  
than Unix named pipes.  I only have experience with them in C and  
Perl programming, but I found that you can't do non-blocking reads on  
a named pipe under Windows, and you can't open, close and reopen the  
same named pipe in a program.  Basically, to use a named pipe for  
accepting messages under Windows, you probably need to spawn a  
separate thread to listen to it.

If you're porting Unix software that uses named pipes to Windows, you  
might be best off selecting a different IPC mechanism altogether,  
such as sockets.  In our porting efforts, we ended up writing a small  
library that simulated Unix named pipes under Windows using shared  
memory.

Tom