How to launch a pipe as a persistent process

Question

Say you run an executable file in this way:

$ echo <params> | <process>

If process is not run as a pipe, then you type $ process & and it will stay running. What is needed in the command line above to launch process persistently?

Update:

More precisely, w3mimgdisplay can be run as a persistent process, that's how w3m keeps the images displayed on a terminal after scrolling. How can this program be run in such a way from the command line?

echo -e '0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;file.png\n4;\n3;' | /usr/lib/w3m/w3mimgdisplay

Answer 1

It seems you need named pipes:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/449132/why-use-a-named-pipe-instead-of-a-file

Basically, you create a named pipe, run the process which gets input from the named pipe, and then pass whatever you want TO the named pipe for it to be processed by the process.

For example:

mkfifo /tmp/namedpipe
tail -f /tmp/namedpipe &
echo "BOO"> /tmp/namedpipe
echo "this" > /tmp/namedpipe

... This will echo (by tail) to stdout everything that is sent to the /tmp/namedpipe.

I use tail instead of cat, because cat will exit the process when it receives EOF.

UPD. Clarification.

To pass this to your process you need to do something like this:

tail -f /tmp/namedpipe | yourprocess &

UP2. So in your case the sequence would be like this:

mkfifo /tmp/namedpipe 

--- this will be the entry point through which you can send data to your process.

tail -f /tmp/namedpipe |  /usr/lib/w3m/w3mimgdisplay &

-- this will then create the persistent process that you want, and will in future feed to it antyhing you send through the pipe.

echo -e '0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;file.png\n4;\n3;' > /tmp/namedpipe

Should show you the image on the screen.

From now on, any further things that you will send to /tmp/namedpipe will be like new lines echoed to the command and should likewise appear on the screen.