feature exists?

Actually this should be a question in a PHP4 mailing list, but there doesn't seem to be one, so maybe this is the right place. Since it may also be a feature request, then it also seems wrong to post on PHP3. I'd like to do a popen() to another program, opened for writing so the PHP script can write to that process, but I also want the stdout from it to be passed straight on through to the browser. This should be simple enough to do (generate headers if not done yet, flush stdout, pass stdout). Is there an undocumented way to do this? The manual is vague about what popen() does, but a test run produced no output see it seems to be not implemented. If there is no way to do this, how easy would it be for me to talk someone into adding it as an extra option on popen()? I can't do it myself since at this time since I don't know my way around the internals of PHP, although I do plan to do that within about a month. But with the real release of 4.0 coming soon, I doubt I can learn the internals enough to do that and provide roll-in source by then. This could certainly open a number of useful things. There exist, for example, programs that takes as stdin a set of graphical commands and it draws images according to those commands, and outputs an image. Many other kinds of data filters could be used this way, all just needing one simple little feature to allow the process to inherit stdout. -- Phil Howard phil@ipal.net