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Re: pipe replacement w/o TerminateThread


On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 12:58:52PM -0500, Steve O wrote:
>On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 01:16:32PM -0400, Joe Buehler wrote:
>>Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>
>>>So that native windows processes will never be able to use cygwin pipes.
>>
>>Sigh.  Which means there is only one alternative left --
>>REPLACE THE PIPE FUNCTIONS IN WINDOWS.
>
>How about encapsulating windows processes in a shell that converts
>cygwin pipes to windows handles?  Nearly everything I run from a 
>shell in windows is a cygwin app.  The rest launch their own windows
>and don't expect input from stdin or print to stdout.

Lots of people seem to use the "net" command from cygwin processes.
People are apparently enamored of this "java" thing, too.

>So, having some crazy overhead to launch a rare windows console app
>wouldn't be a big loss, compared to the win of having robust ttys and
>pipes.

AFAIK, pipes are not "unrobust" right now.  There is an occasional 4k
memory leak when a signal occurs but, at least in my tests, you have to
work hard to see that.

>Taking it further, perhaps a lot of the fork weirdness could be stuffed
>into the windows 'special case' shell. 

Are you saying that you'd have cygwin notice when it was starting a
non-cygwin app, notice that the stdin was a pipe or tty, and start
another "arbitrator" process which actually opened a real pipe and used
cygwin "pipes" as needed?  Hmm.  I guess this would be like that
winoldapp that gets started sometimes on Windows.

>I'm not actually suggesting that this be done, since developer and
>supporter time is in short supply.  I'm just curious if some 
>cygwin2 project would benefit from such an architecture. 

My time is in *really* short supply these days, too, so I can't
experiment with this kind of thing as much as I'd like.

cgf


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