dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (02/11/87)
Thanks for the comments! By the way, I have found that the AmigaDos Copy command seems to screw up when dealing with pipes.... It must try to do an Examine or something. In any case, I am attempting to trace the problem. Since the pipe: device returns unimplimented DOS packets with DOS_FALSE, the problem may lie in Copy. Oh yah... yet another use for pipe: If you are in the habit of making backups, you could pipe a TAR, BACKUP (or most other stream oriented backup programs) through COMPRESS to a file rather than either have no compression or be forced to do the backup to a (very large) temp file first. You should be careful, however, to check that all the pipe segments get executed. If a RUN fails before openning specified redirection files, the program on the other end of the pipe will hang. -Matt P.S. For those of you implimenting devices yourself, note that since a DOS device is a process, it can open and use the DOS library itself... this is invaluable for debugging (open a CON: window). One thing I've noticed is that if you do this, you absolutely cannot block that window by typing space or any other character, or you will cause the system to crash.