I'm trying to come up with a network server for an attached serial device. Since serial communication is point-to-point, once the server "grabs" the serial device by opening the port, serial access to the device from other programs is blocked. This is a problem, since the device in question is programmable via another program that expects to communicate with it via a serial connection. It would be nice to keep the server running and not have to break its connection to the attached device. So I was thinking that if the server could create a virtual serial port, it could intermediate communication between the real device and another program that connects to it using the virtual device. But I'm not sure this is possible in Perl alone or, if so, how to do it.

Any ideas? (The platform is Windows XP, and I'm using ActivePerl.)


In reply to Virtual Serial Port by Dr. Mu

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.