WINE and Windows named pipes

Question

Here is my problem: I have a closed-source third-party Win32 application, which acts as a server for other programs via named pipes, i.e. it expects its clients to do smth like this:

HANDLE h = CreateFile("\\\\.\\pipe\\$pipe_name$", GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, etc...);
// ...
TransactNamedPipe(h, buf, etc...);
// ...
CloseHandle(h);

This app runs perfectly in WINE, except that I can't communicate with it. So here is my question:

What exactly does WINE do when it is requested to open a pipe? Does it, say, map it to some FIFO file in ~/.wine/ or wherever? Is there any way to communicate with such program from a Linux application? Google doesn't know anything about it.

Thank you.

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 13 '11 at 19:56

4

Named Pipes in a wine official wiki

this article could help too: http://lkcl.net/namedpipes/namedpipes-emulation.txt

answered Dec 13 '11 at 19:56

zed_0xff

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This is remote pipes. He is asking about local pipes. – Dark Falcon Dec 13 '11 at 20:11
4

"Named Pipes" (https://wiki.winehq.org/NamedPipes) is now an empty page. – Pierre Dec 15 '17 at 13:59

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 13 '11 at 20:20

4

Named pipes are hosted by the WINE server process. Requests are sent to this process by the WINE clients. For example, CreateNamedPipe uses a request like:

    SERVER_START_REQ( open_file_object )
    {
        req->access     = access;
        req->attributes = attr->Attributes;
        req->rootdir    = wine_server_obj_handle( attr->RootDirectory );
        req->sharing    = sharing;
        req->options    = options;
        wine_server_add_data( req, attr->ObjectName->Buffer, attr->ObjectName->Length );
        io->u.Status = wine_server_call( req );
        *handle = wine_server_ptr_handle( reply->handle );
    }

The server manages connecting the named pipe. Once a client and server have connected, the WINE server gets out of the way by sending an fd to the client. I think this fd is just an anonymous pipe created by the WINE server, one end being sent to the pipe server and one end to the pipe client.

answered Dec 13 '11 at 20:20

Dark Falcon

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Does that mean that it's only possible to communicate with Win app inside the Wine environment? I just don't understand how to "break the wall" between this environment and native Linux. – ScumCoder Dec 13 '11 at 20:40
Yes, you will have to talk to the WINE server in some way in order to gain access to the pipe. – Dark Falcon Dec 13 '11 at 21:08
Thank you, I'll see what I can do. – ScumCoder Dec 14 '11 at 08:18
It might be easiest to write your client as a Windows program and run it under WINE, or perhaps the Windows API from WINE can be easily linked to from a Linux program. These seem like the most straightforward approach, as you then have a documented interface to use. – Dark Falcon Dec 14 '11 at 13:18

WINE and Windows named pipes

2 Answers2