Not a named pipe, but an anonymous pipe to or from another process.

popen() is a lot like fopen() except that it opens a
handle to stdin or stdout of an asynchronous process.

Eg

 FILE *f;
 f = popen( "ssh pi@rp5 vtread -T 2018-02-09_12:00,+6h /raw", "r");

would launch ssh and hook its stdout to the handle *f;

Then fread() on f in the usual way and pclose() when done.
A very common pattern in unix.

So simple, and SL could read signal from arbitrary sources
with it.

But I guess Borland can't support it if the OS doesn't provide it.

I just looked through M$ documentation, there is a way to do it
but it's horrible.  Truly horrible and I wished I hadn't looked.
Whenever I look at MSDN pages, I feel ill for a while, several
hours sometimes.

The first page looks promising until you read the fine print,


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/popen-wpopen

and you have to go to here to witness the full horror of it

 https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/desktop/ms682499

All that to replace one line of code in a proper operating system?
Windows is just awful, awful beyond words.

How anyone can get anything useful out of it I don't know.
There are two good ways to render a computer useless.  One is to
drive over it with a truck, the other is to install Windows.

--
Paul Nicholson
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