Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

How can I regularly and reliably transfer data to a program running on another machine?

You could write a client on the sending machine and a server on the receiving end. Such network programs are not difficult, and you can find many examples on the web in C, Perl and other languages.

However, consider that there are existing client/server programs already: mail and remote printing.

A "printer" on the receiving end can instead process the data it receives: see /Unixart/printing.html for more details on that sort of method.

With mail, you can set up an alias on the receiving end that runs the program you need (obviously the *data* you need is sent in the mail message). That's done by including an alias that might look like this:

 mydata: |/usr/local/bin/myprog

Mail sent to "mydata" gets piped to /usr/local/bin/myprog. If you don't have access to the alias file on the remote machine, use "procmail" (available from Skunkware).

The "mail" method has the additional advantage of including mail header information that might be of use in some circumstances. Obviously you need to strip off those headers before you pass the data on to whatever ultimately needs it.

Got something to add? Send me email.