It'd be useful if there was a standardized way for applications to expose additional streams that worked exactly like stdin/stdout/stderr but with custom names.

It'd be useful if there was a standardized way for applications to expose additional streams that worked exactly like stdin/stdout/stderr but with custom names. At a first glance, named pipes (both the Unix and the Windows approach) sound like that, but they are global names - i can't have an application exposing a "commands" output stream that from the shell is piped to awk which is then piped to a "monitor" input stream of another application - and then have arbitrary number of instances of those. You can ducktape a solution using randomly created unique global names and some shell script code, but what i think would be nice is something like: /* app1 */ FILE* commands = stream("commands", "w"); /* write-only stream */ /* app2 */ FILE* terminal = stream("terminal", "r"); /* read-only stream */ that could be used via something like (:foo would be used wherever a file descriptor could be used to specify stream foo) # redirect commands stream from app1 to terminal stream of app2 app1 :commands>&:terminal app2 # redirect commands stream from app1 to stdout # (stdin of the right side which is empty, hence stdout) app1 :commands>&0 # pipe commands to awk's stdin then grep then app2's terminal stream # regular app1 stdout is not affected and written wherever stdout is app1 :commands| awk blah | grep bleh 1>&:terminal | app2 the shell syntax would also need to be extended a bit to allow for parallel pipelines (e.g. app1 could also export a "comments" stream that could be piped to a separate file or to a projector application).