I am aware of the easiest method of doing this by redirecting the child output to a file and then reading it with the parent.

I also know of using the Bash coproc keyword but I have not personally done it that way.

Is there an additional way of doing this besides the two listed methods? Say, if someone was using a Unix system without Bash 4 and without write access to the filesystem. I was also just curious. As always, thanks and have a good day.

There is command substitution. E.g.,

The $(...) is replaced by the output of the enclosed command.

1 members found this post helpful.

Most commonly, this is done in the way that, say, "the bash 'pipe' ("|") operator does it." You simply arrange for the STDOUT and/or the STDERR handles of the child to be directed to a pipe, then open and read the pipe.

Although pipes "appear to be 'files,'" and can in fact be referred-to by names, they are actually inter-process communication queues that can be manipulated using ordinary fopen/fclose/fread/fwrite/fctl primitives "as though they were files."

Thus: "pipes, therefore also coproc," are(!) "the right way to do it," and "disk files" (despite the possible presence of 'file names,' and the apparent use of file-I/O primitives) are not actually involved.

A pipe, as I said, is a queue. When a reader reads, it is ordinarily "blocked" (put to sleep ...) until data is available to be read. Similarly, when a writer writes to a "full" pipe, it is blocked until the pipe is no longer full. All of this synchronization is completely invisible to the processes, who, so far as they can tell, are simply using "files." The idea was quite magical in the 1970's, and it's still quite magical today.

1 members found this post helpful.