Hi Lee,

 LA>    I'd love to learn more about pipes, but there doesn't seem to be 
 LA>    any kind of comprehensive information about how they work and how 
 LA>    to use them....any ideas ?

Nope, I am not aware of any specifc PIPE info sorry.....;-( However, if you
had a language compiler that used calls to a decent OS (such as
OS/2....;-)), then that could tell you more. Even my old Borland C++ for
OS/2 has some info on them, however that may be going overboard for some
people...

Many OS's now support the use of PIPES, basically they are a "virtual
file" that can be written to and read from just like a real file. Any
data writen into the pipe, stays in the pipe until the pipe is read from by
something, or the pipe is destroyed. Its even possible to PIPE data between
machines on a LAN.

The simplest form of pipe is doing something like -
        Dir *.* | sort
which provided a way of doing a sorted directory list for older versions of
DOS (such as 3.3) which did not have a SORTED directory option. If you do
this under DOS 3.3, you used to see the pipe "file" (a temporary
file assigned by DOS) in the DIR list as well. Modern OS's put Pipes in
memory.

Regards..........pk.


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