Difference Between Popen And Fopen

[fatlazybastard]

I'm working with Maya 7 and was looking in the mel reference. It looks to me like fOpen and pOpen do the exact same thing. The reference doesn't elaborate on the distinction between the two commands, so I'm hoping somebody here can tell me.

Just a quick idea of what I'm working on... I want a script that will open a Maya ASCII file, scan it and replace certain lines of text, then save it out into a new file.

Thanks!

[daniel-faust]

pOpen allows you to issue a command call, not a maya command, but a os command. The result of the command is written into a file which is created only in memory and discarded as soon as you call pClose. You can read or work on that memory mapped file like you would with a normal file. Some commands don't just return a result but rather will be waiting for more input to process which you can pass on by writing into the pipe as you would write into a file.

If you do a pOpen on a file, you create a pipe to the file which is the same as fOpen.

fOpen is for your task.