buffers readlines and general popen2 confusion...

[aristotelian at onet.eu]

I'm interested in taking the output of a daemonized shell script that
greps for patterns which would act as an argument to a script. Is it
better to write this stuff to file and visit the file every few seconds
or can this be done a better way. I'm hoping for a more elegant
solution. So far I've seen some troubling info about buffer overflows
with popen2 but it looks like the low-hanging fruit. I'm not a unixpro
so I want to make sure anything I tackle is best practice. Suggestions
welcomed.

-Aris