Richard Gambrell wrote:
>
> How anyone used perl to do i/o against message files (one in and one out)?
>
> We'd like to use perl to interact with stdin and stdlist from another
> (persistent) application process (I'm sure you all can guess what for?)
> - anybody BTDT?  That is, can perl pretend it is the applications' user
> reading output and sending input back and forth?  The examples we have
> all show a one time send and receive.

I've never personally tried this.  If the POSIX I/O routines will let you talk
to MPE message files, then you should be able to do this with Perl or any other
POSIX program.  If the POSIX API won't let you talk to message files, you could
do a workaround of system("callci 'echo command >msgout'").

Somebody I was talking with at the Long Beach GEN/iX said that he was using PHP
to read/write from message files to communicate with a home grown application
server.  Since PHP is just another POSIX program, therefore I'm hopeful that
Perl should be able to do this too.

An alternative might be POSIX named pipes, but I don't think I've ever played
around with these on MPE.

Or as Mark W. suggested, you could certainly use sockets to do this.

- Mark B.