reliable reads from pipes

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <11145 at alice.UUCP> andrew at alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume) writes:
>	doug's suggestion to look for \n is doubly important
>because your code has both ends of the pipe open in both processes
>and thus you won't get end of file. the rule is that in the process
>that does the writing should close the reading end of teh pipe
>and vice versa.

In fact, most of us would probably use popen() and let it take care of
the details of getting the pipes set up properly, etc.  (Yes, I know
that some popen() implementations have bugs, but I think they all work
well enough for applications like this one.)