Hi, (I am sure this has been solved a billion times, but I am interested in learning by doing ;-)

For example, if I create a sendmail.exe program that I want to drive from Perl (Win32 now, Linux future). I know I can pass parameters on the command line. This isn't a problem for small things...but the line length, at some point, isn't going to be big enough...

I also see programs like "sort.exe" (Win32) I assume they read from STDIN and the when STDIN is closed? they process all words and spit out a sorted list...right? (Seems like they can effectively read any buffer length...) These types of commands don't allow this: "sort.exe /?"

I have looked at pipe, but it seems like it is going to call fork(), which I am avoiding on Win32...

Is it normal to provide 2 sendmail programs? One that you use from the command line: sendmail -s=subj -b=msg_body

And then one that reads from STDIN? (for the msg_body) ?

Is this the right way to send long messages to a simple external program? (ie no IP communication)

Thanks (hope this makes sense ;-)

Edit kudra, 2002-05-11 Changed title per ntc

In reply to Handling long command lines (was: Input to external program) by smackdab

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