http server serving partial files

Question

Is there an HTTP server which can serve files being written/appended to by some other process? I tried to serve a FIFO file with Apache but such files has zero size so Apache serves empty file even if the FIFO has some data in it.

Answer 1

This has a helpful example: http://linuxgazette.net/123/smith.html

Uses php to parse the fifo and shunts it to browser... then ajax to refresh

<?php
  $fp = fopen("ajaxfifo", "r");
  if ($fp) {
    $ajaxstring = fgets($fp, 128);
    fclose($fp);
  }

  header("Content-Type: text/html");
  print($ajaxstring);
?>

If you are wanting to have several/many users accessing, you will need some form of fanout, like his previous page.. handy!