Question

So right now I’ve developed an application that I’m trying to write an API for. The application will ideally return strings back to the user. The API can not “return” the data in the normal programmatically sense because there may be an unknown amount of strings being sent from the application. On Unix systems is it a bad idea to pass this data to the user through a named pipe? I’ve had trouble finding any information on the details of creating API’s. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

The API can not “return” the data in the normal programmatically sense because there may be an unknown amount of strings being sent from the application. On Unix systems is it a bad idea to pass this data to the user through a named pipe?

On Unix it’s common for a program to output its data, as much data as it likes, maybe lots of data, by writing the data to ‘standard output’. The user can pipe this output to th screen or to a file, or pipe it as input to another program (which might, for example, filter the data).

I’ve had trouble finding any information on the details of creating API’s.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ is quite famous, fwiw: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s02.html#plumbing says something (with some example) about using pipes, to output data from one program into another program.