libpipeline, a pipeline manipulation library ============================================ libpipeline is a C library for setting up and running pipelines of processes, without needing to involve shell command-line parsing which is often error-prone and insecure. This alleviates programmers of the need to laboriously construct pipelines using lower-level primitives such as fork(2) and execve(2). Full programmers' documentation may be found using 'man libpipeline'. Installation ------------ If you need to install libpipeline starting from source code, then you will need these separate packages installed before configuring libpipeline in order to run its test suite: pkg-config (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config) check (http://check.sourceforge.net/) See the INSTALL file for general installation instructions. Building programs with libpipeline ---------------------------------- libpipeline supplies a pkg-config file which lists appropriate compiler and linker flags for building programs using it. The output of 'pkg-config --cflags libpipeline' should be passed to the compiler (typically CFLAGS) and the output of 'pkg-config --libs libpipeline' should be passed to the linker (typically LDFLAGS). If your program uses the GNU Autotools, then you can put this in configure.ac: PKG_CHECK_MODULES([libpipeline], [libpipeline]) ... and this in the appropriate Makefile.am (replacing 'program' with the Automake-canonicalised name for your program): AM_CFLAGS = $(libpipeline_CFLAGS) program_LDADD = $(libpipeline_LIBS) The details may vary for particular build systems, but this should be a reasonable start. When building with GCC, you should use at least the -Wformat option (included in -Wall) to ensure that the 'sentinel' function attribute is checked. This means that your program will produce a warning if it calls any of the several libpipeline functions that require a trailing NULL without passing that trailing NULL. Copyright and licensing ----------------------- Copyright (C) 1994 Markus Armbruster. Copyright (C) 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Copyright (C) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Colin Watson. libpipeline is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. libpipeline is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with libpipeline; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA. Note on GPL versions -------------------- (This note is informative, and if it conflicts with the terms of the licence then the licence is correct. See the full text of the licence in the COPYING file for precise details.) The core source code of libpipeline is licensed under GPL v2 or later. However, libpipeline incorporates parts of the Gnulib portability library, copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation and others, and much of Gnulib is distributed under GPL v3 or later. This means that libpipeline as a whole falls under the terms of the GPL v3 or later. Unless you take special pains to remove the GPL v3 portions, you must therefore follow the terms and conditions of the GPL v3 or later when distributing libpipeline itself, or distributing code linked against it. Note that this does not require that your own source code be licensed under the GPL v3, contrary to popular misunderstanding. However, you must be prepared to distribute your work as a whole under the terms of the GPL v3 or later, which requires that your licence be compatible with the GPL v3. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses if you need advice on compatibility. The GPL mainly restricts distribution ("conveying", in the specific language of GPL v3), and is careful not to restrict private use. Therefore, you may write programs for your own use that use libpipeline without needing to license them under GPL v3-compatible terms. If you distribute these programs to others, then you must take care to use compatible licensing. Credits ------- Thanks to Scott James Remnant for code review, Ian Jackson for an extensive design review, and Kees Cook and Matthias Klose for helpful conversations. -- Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>