LPM: filtering

[Joe Hourcle]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Frank Price wrote:

> Yah, I know about Text::Wrap, and it works great.  Seemed a shame to
> load a module just for that if I could roll my own though (although
> forking might be just as bad).  
> 
> Anyway, a more abstract version of my question is:  Can I pipe to a
> program, print to it, and then read from that stdout so I can do
> something else with it?  The "fork off another process" idea from the
> Cookbook seems to be what I want, but something's going wrong.

>From Programming Perl:

	You may not have an open command that pipes both in and out,
	although the IPC::Open2 and IPC::Open3 library routines give you a
	close equivalent.

In your example, however, you knew what the arguments were that you were
passing it...

so you could just as easy call:

	open (WHATEVER, "echo $input | program to send to |");

(of course, you'd have to make sure that you stripped out any characters
that might confuse the shell, which means, doing this badly could result
in a major security hole.)

-Joe