Communication between two programs on unix

[morden]

Geoff Gerrietts wrote:

> Quoting morden (morden at shadows.net):
>
> >I want the communication to work over cu session because some of our
> >customers live in stone age and don't have Internet connection.
> >So I want to run gui locally and eventually throw out Motif and move
> >all the gui into Tkinter. For now I'm just moving modal dialogs
> >into Tkinter.
> >The reason to dump Motif is because the lib we use on top of it (Zinc
> >4.0) seems pretty buggy and Tk is pretty stable compared to it.
> >
>
>
> I'm still not quite able to make sense of how you expect or desire the
> final product to work.
>
> I've got that you want to use a variety of different "links":
> cross-memory, via popen; cross-serial line, via cu; cross-internet,
> via ssh.
>
> I'm not sure what data you're really looking to have the programs
> exchange. It sounds to me like what you'd like to do is present the
> motif application as it stands, but on occassion, override its
> behaviors with dialogs you've created.
>
> This is going to be nontrivial. I can't speak definitively for what
> must happen to make this work, but there's no simple file-like,
> character-mode interface for an X program. Or, rather, there's a
> file-like interface, but the data transfered on that connection is
> going to consist of X server instructions. Your "client program", the
> tkinter jobbie, would need to fake the motif program into believing it
> was an X server (I think nontrivial), and the tk program must know
> enough to know when its being asked to draw a modal dialog (maybe
> easy, maybe not).
>
> I have no idea about the feasibility of doing this via cu. I also
> don't know if you can hijack ssh's X forwarding facility to accomplish
> this for you -- maybe, but I honestly don't know. I think you might
> need to go with an ssh-tunnel solution.
>
> Am I on the right track here? Or do you really want to exchange only
> that information that, if started from an xterm, your two programs
> would print to the terminal, rather than display in a GUI?

I just needed a simple transport to pipe python commands between two 
programs back and forth. The previous emails seem to have answered my 
question. I'd use ssh port forwarding in connection with netcat for 
communication over ssh and popen2 package for the case when two programs
run on one host.

Thank you.