Hi,

Thanks for all your help,

This is (I hope) a clearer explanation of what I am thinking of doing:

I am going to set up the clients on the master machine and the servers on the slave machines as ahunter points out. But are they only for use on one machine? I get the impression from Win32::Pipe, that you specify a server for the pipe to reside on (if that's the right terminology), but you can access it on another networked machine.

I plan on setting up the pipes once, when the machine boots up, so I will have to think more about the machine going down or losing network connection. Thank you Blue.

I hope that my scripts will be secure - you shouldn't be able to get them to format the hard disks or anything. But I will try and impliment some sort of extra security.

I suppose I will have to work this one out by trial and error, but once the pipe is 'open' to the pipe, how can I make the server 'end' keep checking the pipe to see if anything is written at the other end? i.e. I don't want the server to accept the connection, try read what's coming down, but not find anything because it hasn't been sent yet.

e.g. in this example (from roth.net) - if the client doesn't send straight away won't the server end up with an empty variable for $In?...

    if( $Pipe->Connect() )
    {
      my $In;
      
      $User = ( $Pipe->GetInfo() )[2];
      print "Pipe opened by $User.\n";
      
      $In = $Pipe->Read();
      
      print "Client sent us: "$In";
      
      print "Disconnecting...\n";
      $Pipe->Disconnect();
    }
[download]

Thanks for all your help.