Yes. If you want to follow the rules and if you are sending data bidirectionally. Or you can use a socket. Sockets are bidirectional and work very much like pipes once established.

thats right, this wont work...

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Select is then a method without fork, but I haven't understood it completely, what does the Select do, it determines from which socket 'data comes in', and then reads it?

No. select tells you when a filehandle is ready for reading or writing or when it has an error condition. You need to do the I/O yourself. It can be used with or without fork.

While the implementation of threads, and maybe the syntax may change, using threads may still be your best bet.

HTH, --traveler