interprocess communication without disk access

[Phenom]

Is it possible for an AutoIt script to send information to another AutoIt script or another program without having to resort to writing to disk? Is it possible for another program to access the memory of an AutoIt script to get information? I would like to share information stored in a string variable. I have an AutoIt script whose only purpose is to put information into a string variable. I'd like to run another program concurrently which periodically checks the value in that variable and then does something with it. How can I share this information with the other program without having to write it to disk?

Edited August 29, 2010 by Phenom

[MilesAhead]

There are a couple of ways. You could use _SendMessage using WM_COPYDATA or a memory mapped file. If you search example scripts you should find implementations. For a lot of data memory mapped file is better.

edit: See memory mapped file docs. CreateFileMapping lets you pass -1 as a handle to use system paging as backing for the data, rather than a named file on disk(works even if there's no pagefile.sys... at least it does for me using one memory page.)

Edited August 30, 2010 by MilesAhead

[SSzretter]

Will this only work in a "GUI" type script, or between a script running as local user account and script running as a system service?   I was not able to get this to work between service script/user script (no GUI).

[water]

If you search the Example scripts forum for "inter process communication" you'll get a lot of hits. "Mailslot" by trancexx is one of the best and easiest to use.