Pipes

[David Bolen]

Dale Strickland-Clark <dale at riverhall.NOSPAMco.uk> writes:

> I notice that pipe support in Python is specific to Unix.

Depends on what sort of pipes you are talking about.  For normal
process to process pipes, prior to 2.0, while os.popen() was the only
call within the Python core that worked on both Unix and Windows (the
popen2 module was really for Unix), win32pipe picked up the slack.

In Python 2.0 and later, the standard os module has popen and popen#
calls that work on both Unix and Windows.

> There is win32pipe for Windows but documentation is thin, to say the
> least.

Most of the win32all modules are wrappers around standard Win32 calls.
In general, the docs with the package just give you anything specific
to their Python implementation/interface.  For more detail, just pull
up documentation on the underlying Win32 calls, such as in MSDN.  If
you don't have a local set of documentation, they are available at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp.

> Has anyone done any work on inter-process and inter-machine
> communication?

For interprocess I normally go ahead and use the popen# functions.
For inter-machine I'm much more likely to use an IP approach with
sockets (I've done named pipes in pure Windows applications that
weren't written in Python but not in Python to this point).

--
-- David
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