Is there a straightforward way to send a message to my Elixir process from a bash script?
To avoid the XY problem, I am trying to implement a pianobar eventcmd, which is a script that is run on each event (such as song change) and receives the majority of it’s input via stdin. Should I use a pipe? I could do an HTTP Request but that seems awfully inefficient.
I can think of solving this a number of ways. Do you have distribution available? If not i would use a domain socket if you are on a Linux or OSx machine. (i think OSX supports unix domain sockets)
From an iex session:
I’m thinking of trying to solve this without distribution since I don’t want to trust the network. That said these two processes will be on the same machine (although there will be another machine running Nerves and Scenic, but that will be a different communication mechanism). The machine running pianobar will be Linux (although it would be nice to support OS X as well).
What advantages does a domain socket have over a named pipe if we want to operate within the same operating system?
I found that useful to send messages from system cron. Note the use of a backslash in front of %. I have a GenServer called CronServer in charge of parsing the message and calling the appropriate client function in the interested GenServers. I also use sched_ex for cron jobs internal to the app.