[Info-vax] Unix equivalent of a mailbox device ?

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Say on VMS I have a background process that created a mailbox with a
> systen-wide logical pointing to it. Users can use DCl to write a message
> to that mailbox which causes the detached process to do certain things
> with the received daya. (say the daya is anywhere between a couple of
> bytes to 110 bytes).
> 
> 
> When moving to Unix, what are the equivalent frameworks that one can use?
> 
> From what I have read, "signals" just send a number to a process. Correct ?
> 
> Do "pipes" work between processes ? How would one process find out about
> another process' available pipe ? What are the unix "pipe" equivalents
> to the SYS$CREMBX, SYS$ASSIGN, SYS$QIO to interact with another
> process's pipe ?

Maybe not answering you unix-question, but... :-)

Note that in later VMS versions the creation in the
background process is much simplified using the new
CREATE/MAILBOX DCL syntax. One rather simple

$ CREATE /MAILBOX /PERMANENT  BGR_PROC_MBX

creates a permanent mailbox and defines the
system logical "BGR_PROC_MBX" pointing to the
actual MBX created. That logical can then be used
by other processed to open the MBX and write to it.

So all processing in both the background and in the other
processes can be done from pure DCL, if one wants to...