I'm going to pretend for a second that you're in control of the conversion program, or that the conversion program is a well-thought-out program.

In the ideal world, you'd simply extend the pipe: 

  open my $fh, "gunzip -c $filename | convert_to_text - |";

[download]

Thus, gunzip would uncompress as much as it could before getting blocked on a pipe to convert_to_text which would read the binary from stdin, and write the text to stdout, both of which would block when empty/full, respectively, and your script could deal with the text on the way through.

Back to reality ... in the more common case, I see nothing wrong with ramfs - as long as it works and doesn't corrupt your data, same as any other filesystem. You just have to be careful that you're not wasting ram on stuff that could make your system faster in other ways. For example, if that ram were instead used for physical filesystem caching, you'd get almost the same effect, and ram that wasn't in use for caching (vs ramfs) could still be used for your programs.

In reply to Re^3: Using ramfs to process files by Tanktalus
in thread Using ramfs to process files by jalewis2

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