I want to create a Bash shell script to be able to talk with epic ( a simple IRC client) by outputing commands to it while it is being run in the background. I have tried everythign I could think of and find out. Either it worked, but EOF killed epic or it diden't work at all.

I'm thinking the best way to do this would be with named pipes...so I tried the following....

First I created a pipe.

mkfifo pipe

Then I connect the pipe to epic and send it in the background

epic < pipe &

Finaly, I try to give epic some input, so I do something like

echo "/server blablabla.bla" > pipe

It works, but epic dies right away because of EOF...is there anyway to prevent the EOF. I have also tried replacing echo with cat and putting the commands in a file....same problem.

Does it work properly when run like this (the epic part) from command line?

while [ 1 -eq 1 ]; do epic < pipe ; done &

Or does

nohup epic < pipe &

have the desired effect, (Yup I don't use epic to try )

Well, no matter what I tried it woudlen't work with epic...so, I tried using nohup like you said with BitchX and it acutaly worked I was talking with peiople on IRC directly from the command line. However, my true plan behind all this is to create a IRC bot with Bash Shell scripting (more just to see if I can do it and as a fun project to do after learning just a littler mroe shell scripting...).

This is where the problem comes...the output epic or irssi (treied that and still got the stupid EOF terminated the program message) is veyr nice and would be easy to filter....BitchX's output isen't. But oh well...i can work with it. If you know a simple IRC program that would work with pipes correctly though that woudl be awesome. Anyways, thanks so much fo ryour help

EDIT: Well...I tried variouse other clients, include ircII, and none of them wanted to work properly with pipes. However, I am happy to say, that after much work I created a IRC bot with BASH shell scripting...of course it is very beta...but it works ^^