File-like interface without physically writing to filesystem

Question

In the project I'm working on I have two Windows 7 processes interacting with each other:

• process A - a 3rd party, closed-source service that loads files from the hard drive
• process B - an in-house process that creates those files and writes them to the hard drive

Current setup works as expected, however it breaks one of the business requirements - we are not allowed to create temporary files while processing the data.

On Linux I could create a "pipe file" TMP_FILE with mkfifo and use it as a buffer between those processes instead of writing to filesystem. When it comes to Windows - I'm totally lost.

Question:

On Windows 7, how can I meet the requirement of not creating temporary files on disk, when a process I cannot modify can only read from files?

Additional information:

• process A receives XML messages with filenames of files to process
• process B is only a prototype and can be modified in any way necessary
• the original data is send over SCP from Linux server and received by process B, the protocol can be changed if that helps

Answer 1

The Windows equivalent of what you are asking for appears to be called a Named Pipe

Named pipes cannot be mounted within a normal filesystem, unlike in Unix. Also unlike their Unix counterparts, named pipes are volatile (removed after the last reference to them is closed). Every pipe is placed in the root directory of the named pipe filesystem (NPFS), mounted under the special path \\.\pipe\ (that is, a pipe named "foo" would have a full path name of \\.\pipe\foo). Anonymous pipes used in pipelining are actually named pipes with a random name.

The documentation for named pipes can be found at MSDN

How to actually implement this would be out of scope for SuperUser, but there are examples on Stack Overflow

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Alternatively per my comment above if you want the speed of RAM but for whatever reason want a "real filesystem" there is also the option of a using a Ramdisk. Depending on the quantity and size of files there is the Dataram Ramdisk or its branded spinoff the AMD Radeon Ramdisk. I believe that they are limited to 2GB in the free versions.

Wikipedia has a reasonably comprehensive list of Ramdisk software