[erlang-questions] Issues with stdin on ports

[Anthony Grimes]

Hey Robert.


I don't think C nodes help in this case, and they don't solve the general problem. One of my use cases is talking to pygmentize, which is a Python program. If I want to do that, I have to write a middleman program that does the actual communication with this program and talks to my Erlang program over a socket, or via ports if I make the middleman program look for some specific sequence of bytes to treat as EOF since I can't send actual EOF.

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 2:12 AM, Robert Raschke <rtrlists@REDACTED>
wrote:

> Hi Anthony,
> In the past, I've tended to use the port mechanism to simply kick off a C
> node, which then allows you to have full control over whatever
> communications needs you have.
> This obviously only works if you are interfacing with a technology that
> will allow you to create C node and use the EI libs in some way. Not sure
> if that is the case from what you wrote.
> Regards,
> Robby
> On Jul 29, 2013 8:04 AM, "Anthony Grimes" <i@REDACTED> wrote:
>>  Howdy folks.
>>
>> I unfortunately have not been able to use Erlang for most of what I've
>> been doing lately because of a long standing issue with Erlang ports
>> that I'd like to start a discussion about here.
>>
>> As far as I am aware, ports are generally the only option for creating
>> and communicating with external processes in Erlang. They seem to have
>> at least one particular fatal flaw which prevents them from being very
>> useful to me, and that is that there is no way to close stdin (and send
>> EOF) and then also read from the process's stdout. For example, I cannot
>> use a port to start the 'cat' program which listens on stdin for data
>> and waits for EOF and then echos that data back to you. I can do the
>> first part, which is send it data on stdin, but the only way for me to
>> close it is to call port_close and close the entire process.
>>
>> This issue prevents Erlang users from doing any even slightly more than
>> trivial communication with external processes without having some kind
>> of middleman program that handles the creation of the actual process you
>> need to talk to and looks for a specific byte sequence to indicate 'EOF'.
>>
>> I could totally be wrong, but it seems like we need something other than
>> just port_close. Something like
>> http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/**gen_tcp.html#shutdown-2<http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/gen_tcp.html#shutdown-2>
>>  which lets you say
>> "Hey, I want to close the stdin of this process but still read from its
>> stdout." or something similar. I could be totally off track on what a
>> good solution would be.
>>
>> So I'm wondering if people are aware of this problem, and I'd like to
>> make sure that people think it is an actual problem that should be
>> fixed. I'm also curious what people think a good solution to the problem
>> would be. I'm not sure I have the time/particular skill set to fix it
>> given that the port code is some pretty obscure (to me) C code, but
>> starting conversation seems like a good way to begin.
>>
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>>
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