LUA SHELL & others through shell

[david at anon.nu]

Hi Mr Bill :)

william griffin wrote:

> I can't help but think there is a better way to send commands to a  
> program
> running in unix other than : shell(<the program name> & cr & <a field  
> full of commands>)
> It seems to me that simply using shell() doesn't open the process  
> permanently
> like sending the command to terminal.

Not that I've found yet.

> Maybe somewhere in the other language/ environment/ whatisit I should
> have some statements to read and write data back and forth
> to and from the rev application/standalone via sockets?

Probably the easiest I think would be to use EXPECT 
(http://expect.nist.gov/) - this get around pretty well everything and 
is purpose designed to do what you want - a truly beautifully ugly hack 
:) It has C bindings, is fast and light and well tested. You don't have 
to use the C bindings - as their is a language independent API as well. 
It basically allows you to put wrappers around any interactive command 
line tool so that you can treat it as a nicely behaves script you can 
call and get your results back. And yes you have good control over the 
process (backgrounding etc).

> Any thoughts?

Another related thought is to something like SWIG if what you want is 
intercommunication between a wide range of languages (via C bindings), 
or a project called SIMPL. I've done a little light weight research and 
testing on most of these - but no decisions made yet. So any thoughts 
from the list appreciated,

david