title: Is it possible to pipe HDF5 formated data?
body: <p>It is possible to write HDF5 to stdout and read from stdin (via <code>H5::File file("/dev/stdout",H5F_ACC_RDONLY)</code> or otherwise)?</p>
  
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  <p>What I want is to have a program <code>foo</code> to write to an HDF5 file (taken to be its first argument, say) and another program <code>bar</code> to read from an HDF5 file and then instead of</p>
  
  <pre><code>command_prompt&gt; foo temp.h5
  command_prompt&gt; bar temp.h5
  command_prompt&gt; rm temp.h5
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>simply say</p>
  
  <pre><code>command_prompt&gt; foo - | bar -
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where the programs <code>foo</code> and <code>bar</code> understand the special file name <code>-</code> to mean <code>stdout</code> and <code>stdin</code> respectively. In order to write those programs, I want to know 1) whether this is at all possible and 2) how I implement this, i.e. what to pass to <code>H5Fcreate()</code> and <code>H5Fopen()</code>, respectively, in case file name = <code>-</code>.</p>
  
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  <p>I tried and it seems impossible (not a big surprise). HDF5 only has <code>H5Fcreate()</code>, <code>H5Fopen()</code>, and <code>H5Freopen()</code>, neither of which seems to support I/O to <code>stdin/stdout</code>.</p>