[plug] Named pipe. Solution to programming problem?

[James Devenish]

Hi,

In message <419C96E7.4070301 at tigris.org>
on Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 08:34:47PM +0800, Timothy White wrote:
> Basically I want the list to update when ever a program tries to access 
> it (to keep resources down to a minimum) and I can't modify every 
> program so that they run a program every time they read the file.
> I am more clear now?

Ah, yep. Named pipes would indeed be a solution to this problem. The
process that creates and maintains the pipe *will* need to be running
all the time, but it need invoke the update routines only when the pipe
is opened by a client. *However*, a named pipe is opened differently
from a regular file, so your client programmes would have to be
rewritten (which you say you cannot do). It sounds more like you need
POSIX STREAMS support (yes, that's STREAMS in all-caps). It allows a
regular file to be backed by a programme. However, I'm not sure whether
STREAMS are widely available with Linux.