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If the application is acting as a sink or filter for data, it must
attach a BPipe
to an input data stream. If the program serves
only as a source of data, it doesn't require an input stream.
bpipe_input
attaches a data stream to a BPipe's
input
channel and reads and parses the data stream's header packet. A
BPipe
cannot be attached to more than one input source.
If the program is a source or a filter of data, it must attach at least
one output stream to the BPipe
. The bpipe_output
function creates an output channel and attaches a data stream to it. It
returns a handle to the output channel that is used to identify the
channel to other utility routines. More than one output stream may be
connected to a single BPipe
. If the input stream will be split
into multiple output streams, it's far easier to attach multiple output
streams than to create multiple BPipes
, as it is possible to
specify on a per output stream basis the data fields that are to be
written.
At present input and output streams must be either files or the UNIX standard input or standard output streams. See bpipe_input and bpipe_output.