[Open Babel] Fwd: Wishlist: Read input/output through pipes

[Michael B. <mb...@gm...>]

Hi,

I had an email discussion with chemtool (2D chemical structure drawing
program) upstream who said (translated from german):

"Well I'm anxious if, when crystallographic formats reappear, a proper
symmetry routine will be there or if it's the old SUBROUTINE BURZ from
Burzlaff, thats everywhere around by now (I think there should be a
library with crystallographic functions - should be found via
www.ccp14.ac.uk)"

He's doing crystallographic stuff in his day job, IIRC. I don't know
anything about this I fear.

And this is the other (which makes a lot of sense to me):

"Another idea for Openbabel - For what I do, I'd really appreciate it
if one could call the command-line tool through a pipe, i.e. if at least
the output file could be "-" for stdout. I wouldn't have to go via
temporary files then - But my C++ ignorance is so vast that I don't know
how to point ofs to cout :-("

Chemtool is written in C (I pointed him to cwrap.cpp, but this does not
look very universal, doesn't it?)

cheers,

Michael