[newbie] Erlangish way of Iterator pattern

[Gaspar Chilingarov]

Hello!

I'm beginning to program in erlang and hit the following problem.
in mainstream language i will do the following -- create Iterator class 
to read data from socket or file
i.e. class with Open/GetNext functions. Open should just do all work for 
preparing data source and GetNext will return lines of data or 
EOF(freeing resources when reaching EOF).


what i have in erlang -- i have erlang process, which can accept data 
messages and eof messages and do processing. another process hangs 
around, waiting for TCP connection and feeding first process with data 
read from TCP. in the same time i have shell script which runs once a 
minute and feeds data from some file(or piped command line) to TCP port.

now i want to get rid of shell script, but i wish to have separate 
module which will do this -- i.e. 1. running periodically external 
command, 2. feeding to another process.

are there any idioms in Erlang for this or it should be implemented in 
straight way -- i.e. just another process sitting there and doing it's 
job -- file reading/parsing/feeding to another process ?



-- 
Gaspar Chilingarov
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