I know that I had the idea to chain messengers.

Say gate ones that would use sockets and interior one using named pipes or Unix sockets ( I could implement both and choose depending on the platform).

What I'm not so sure about is the design choice of letting anyone but a head of messengers demon open the necessary file handles :-$

Update I'm going to give it a try that way : only the head of messengers do the file handle management, he shall use a named pipe for his orders (thus making itself easily cross platform) and shall receive his working parameters as a hash of the following type :

my %params = (
    input=>{name=>'filename',
            type=>'unix_socket|network_socket|named_pipe',
            bind=>address,#if network socket},
    output=>{output1=>'filename|socket_name',
             output2=>'idem',
             ...
             ...
             },
);
[download]

then he shall open the file handles and create a child process with a little messenger demons that will relay data to and from them. It seemed more elegant than the first idea where I count on other modules to make the right parameter hash for the messenger demon instanciation method (furthermore it should allow me to update this method without having to change code everywhere).

I will post the resulting code in the CUFP section, might give some of you quite a laugh (I'm quite new to multi process programing).
Cheers!