Control.Concurrent.Chan: how do i close a channel?

[Claus Reinke]

> think pipes: if an external process takes input via a handle and provides
> output via a handle, the haskell equivalent could do the same via a Chan,
> so it'd be easy to write mixed pipes.

for illustration, here is the kind of utility that i find missing in System.Process,
using the Maybe lifting of Chan contents. this doesn't do any error handling,
but allows for simple-minded pipes like:

    $ ghc -e 'cmd "cat" >|> fun (map Data.Char.toUpper) >|> cmd "grep WO"
        >>= \(i,o)->i "hello\nWORLD\n">>o >>= putStr' ProcUtils.hs
    WORLD

    $ ghc -e 'cmd "ls" >|> fun (map Data.Char.toUpper) >|> cmd "grep .HS"
        >>= \(i,o)->o >>= putStr' ProcUtils.hs
    PROCUTILS.HS
    X.HS
    Y.HS
    Z.HS

lifting contents to Maybe is easy enough, i just find it hard to see
the use-case for getChanContents without such lifting or any way
to close Chans?

claus

---------------------------------------------------pipe utitlities
import System.Process
import Control.Concurrent
import System.IO
import Data.Maybe

cmd c = runInteractiveCommand c >>= \(i,o,e,p)->return (hPutStr i,hGetContents o)

fun f = do
  i <- newChan
  o <- newChan
  forkIO $ fromChan i >>= toChan o . f
  return (toChan i,fromChan o)

infixr >|>

c1 >|> c2 = do
  (i1,o1) <- c1
  (i2,o2) <- c2
  forkIO $ o1 >>= i2
  return (i1,o2)

toChan c str = writeList2Chan c $ map Just str ++ [Nothing]
fromChan c   = getChanContents c >>= return . map fromJust . takeWhile isJust