usockit

About

usockit is a program to asynchronously send data to another program's standard input stream.

The Problem

Given a program (e.g.: some server application) that reads commands from its standard input.
It is desired that this program runs in the background, even without a controlling terminal — i.e.: nohup <program> &

Without a controlling terminal, the standard input can not be accessed.

Letting the program read from a regular file or from a FIFO special file (named pipe) wouldn't work since an EOF would be sent, which would stop any command processing form the programs side.

A Solution

Have an extra program (the usockit server) listen to a UNIX domain socket. Any data sent to this socket is forwarded to the original program's standard input.
Yet another program (the usockit client) would connect to the UNIX domain socket and would forward its standard input to the socket.
Since the client programs are completely decoupled from the original program, client connections are able to be closed and reopened without influencing the original program.

Usage

usockit console_socket -- prog arg1 arg2 ... argN

This will create a new UNIX domain socket called console_socket and execute the program prog with the arguments arg1, arg2, ... and argN.
The child process' standard input is controlled by the usockit server, to send data to it, a usockit client must be connected to the same socket:

usockit console_socket

The usockit binary will know that this is supposed to be a client and not a server since there is no command specified.

The client will now read from its standard input until end-of-file and will transfer all data to the socket, where the server will pick it up and forward it to the child program.

Download & Installation

Download & installation must be done manually by cloning this repository and building from source:

git clone 'https://github.com/mfederczuk/usockit.git' -o 'usockit' &&
	cd 'usockit' &&
	make build_type=release &&
	sudo make build_type=release install

Contributing

Read through the Contribution Guidelines if you want to contribute to this project.

License

usockit is licensed under both the Mozilla Public License 2.0 AND the Apache License 2.0.
For more information about copying and licensing, see the COPYING.txt file.