Multiple stdout to one stdin

Question

I'm on Windows, although I could be on Linux so solutions for either are welcome.

I have a program that is essentially a game with 4 players that take an instruction from each of those players. Basically the idea is to have 4 groups to create an AI for this game. I need to route the stdout of all 4 of these AI programs to the stdin of my contest program. How would I do that?

Answer 1

Named pipes accepts output from anybody (if permissions allow it)

#!/bin/bash

mkfifo -m 666 /tmp/myfifo.pipe

( echo 'Proc1' 1> /tmp/myfifo.pipe ) &
PID1=$!
( echo 'Proc2' 1> /tmp/myfifo.pipe ) &
PID2=$!
( echo 'Proc3' 1> /tmp/myfifo.pipe ) &
PID3=$!

 cat </tmp/myfifo.pipe > result.txt

wait $PID1 $PID2 $PID3

rm -f /tmp/myfifo.pipe