After much programming and processing, I finally have my data ready for the last step - I want to run it (basically a text file) through a program (call it foo), and write out the processed file.

I have tried to search for ways to do this, but two-way pipes seem fairly complicated. Should I write the file to a temporary file, and use foo to read that file (it can read from a file or STDIN, and always writes to STDOUT without redirection), and grab STDOUT, and write that to a file?

A search seems to tell me that the preferred way is to do something like:

open(PIPE_FROM_FOO, -|);

But I still didn't see how to call foo in the examples (they mostly concerned writing to a pipe).

I have my textfile in a variable called $myfile. Can someone tell me the "best" way (or any good way), to run it through foo?

update (broquaint): title change (was piping)

In reply to Confusion with two-way pipes by Anonymous Monk

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