I have a CLI application which is executed via Wine on Linux as it needs some closed source DLLs which are only available for Windows. However I also have another tool which is much easier to compile/run on Linux. That Linux application communicates via STDIN/STDOUT.
So I want to spawn a native Linux process from Wine, pass some data (ideally via stdin), wait for the process to complete and read its result (ideally via stdout). This is trivial if both processes would be run in the same OS environment (pure Linux/Posix/Windows) but more complicated in my case.
I can spawn a Linux process using popen but I can't get its stdout (always getting an empty string).
I understand that Wine itself won't/can't provide blocking process creation (probably this creates a lot of edge cases when trying to maintain Windows semantics) as detailed in Wine bug 18335, stackoverflow answer "Execute Shell Commands from Program running in WINE".
However the Wine process is still running under Linux so I think it should be possible to somehow tap into Linux's (= kernel) functionality and do a blocking read.
- Does anyone have some pointers on how to launch a Linux process and get its stdout from Wine?
- Any other ideas on how to do IPC without complicated server installs?
Theoretically I could use to file system and wait for a result file to appear or run a TCP/HTTP server for communication. Ideally the input is only accessible for the launched application without a server port which every application on the same host can access.
I read about "winelib" as a way to access native Unix functionality from "Windows" programs but I'm not sure I fully grasp how to use it and if it helps me (I can adapt the Wine program but as I mentioned earlier I need to access some closed source DLLs which I can not modify).
Edit: I just noticed the zugbruecke library which allows to communicate with a Windows DLL from (Unix) Python (via a custom wine+TCP connection from Python's multiprocesing). I can not use that as-is (my DLL library uses a lot of pointers so I have wrapped it via pybind11) and it would mean I have to rework my application a bit. However it might result in an elegant solution where the Windows bits are more isolated and I can have more Linux fun. :-)
