CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsfilenamed-pipes
hyde
hyde

Reputation: 62817

Virtual/programmatically generated file on Windows?

I'm looking for a feature similar to CreateNamedPipe on Windows, which would allow programmatically generating file contents on demand. However, it would need to support seek operation as well, so plain named piped will not work, I think. Or does it?

Some details: The file will be read by other existing program, and changing that is not possible in this case. The two specific uses are: 1. the actual data is in a compressed binary blob. 2. the actual data is behind a network connection, accessed with a custom protocol. In both cases, the "virtual" file would give access to date as if it were a local regular file.

I'm sure this would be possible at least by creating a custom file system device driver, or using existing network file system and creating custom server program. But this sounds like very complex (is it?) and not worth the effort.

So, any practical efficient solution, other than just storing the data to regular temp file?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 60

Answers (1)

bmargulies
bmargulies

Reputation: 100051

You need to write a kernel device driver, or take advantage of one of the existing user mode device driver frameworks, such as UMDF. You can start reading up on that on Wikipedia.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions