You're right, network sockets should be part of the filesystem. Arnold Robbins, author of GNU awk, is a fan of Plan 9 which did this the right way. It was pro

You're right, network sockets should be part of the filesystem. Arnold Robbins, author of GNU awk, is a fan of Plan 9 which did this the right way. It was probably the motivation for him adding special files to awk, e.g. "/inet/tcp/0/localhost/17921". $ nc -l -p 17921 & [1] 31333 $ date | awk '{print NR, NF [greater than sign]"/inet/tcp/0/localhost/17921"}' 1 4 [1]+ Done nc -l -p 17921 $ http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawkinet/gawkinet.html http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawkinet/gawkinet.html has more examples. Perhaps there's a FUSE module which gives us a network sockets filesystem? Cheers, Ralph. P.S. It's annoying that posters should waste their time probing the mark-up's flaws. Is there a description of it anywhere, e.g. what characters vanish, or how to break lines?