rtidd@ccels3.mitre.org (Randy Tidd) (09/10/90)
With all these new comp.unix.* groups coming out, I hope it's appropriate to cross-post to .programmer and .internals... Anyhow, in the application i'm working on I have a series of routines that were written by someone else that do image processing (the fbm library, if you're familiar with it), including source. These routines take a file pointer as an argument, and they read the image-to-be-processed through this fp. Normally what you do is open a file and pass in a file pointer to it, or pass in stdin and pipe your image through the program through the shell. The problem is in my application, I am using a database and thus don't have files and thus I don't have file pointers either. What I *can* do is query the database for an image, and it gives me a block of memory that holds the image *exactly* as it is stored in file form. So what I have is a block of memory, having exactly the same size and contents of a file. What I have to do is pass my image processing routines a file pointer that points to this block of memory. If the routines used file *descriptors*, it wouldn't be a problem because I could just use pipes and be done with it. What I do now is query the database, get a block of memory, dump this memory to a temporary file, open the file with a file pointer, and pass the file pointer to the image processing routines. Not only is this dumb, but images can be a big as 3 megs and this is incredibly inefficient. Can anyone help me out? Randy Tidd GOOD rtidd@mwunix.mitre.org FAST #define DISCLAIM TRUE CHEAP -pick any two