Node:Portal Files, Next:Profiling, Previous:TCP/IP Networking, Up:Advanced Features

Using gawk with BSD Portals

Similar to the /inet special files, if gawk is configured with the --enable-portals option (see Compiling gawk for Unix), then gawk treats files whose pathnames begin with /p as 4.4 BSD-style portals.

When used with the |& operator, gawk opens the file for two-way communications. The operating system's portal mechanism then manages creating the process associated with the portal and the corresponding communications with the portal's process.