Plugin Writing Guide


Introduction

In order to make ESM the easiest possible program to use I'd like all plugin writers to please follow these conventions when writing your plugins.

Install Directory

All plugins should be install in esmdir/plugins esmdir should default to /usr/local/esm and should be user changable in the Makefile.

Signals

Please honor SIGHUP! And please cleanup after yourself. This includes stopping all proccesses created and deleteing all temp files. esmd can't do this for you. But you can. :)

Security

For security reasons all temp files should be created with the permissions 600.

Stdin & Stdout

Any plugin should work perfect when both stdin and stdout are FIFOs. To test for this make two FIFO's with mkfifo. Then redirect stdin and stdout to the FIFOs. For instance someplugin < stdin_fifo > stdout_fifo You may need to do some fflush(NULL)'s in a C program to make things work right.

To be continued... :)

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© 1999 Peter Todd
Created on 09/12/1999 Last update - $Id: plugin.html,v 4.0 1999/10/07 22:57:36 pete Exp $