Command line pub / sub without a server?

Question

Is there a way of implementing the publish / subscribe pattern from the command line without using a server process? This need only work on one machine.

The main thing I want to avoid by not having a server process is having configure a machine to use these tools. I'm also quite keen on not having to deal with the possibility of my server process dying.|

This might look something like:

# client 1
subscribe name | while read line; do echo $line; done

# client 2
subscribe name | while read line; do echo $line; done

# server
echo message | publish name

Related links

• POSIX ipc provides a serverless message queue and there are command-line clients for it (1) (2) (3). This could be used together with some sort of state storage to implement the above.
• ZMQ provides a protocol for pub / sub communication. There are command-line tools analogous to nc for using ZMQ, such as zmcat. These could be used to set up a minimal command-line pub/sub pattern with a server.
• Linux provides another IPC mechanism called named pipes (c.f. mkfifo). I don't know what the intended behaviour with multiple consumers is. But some initial experimentation suggests that each message is only received by one of the consumers

Answer 1

All subscribers need to be notified of new data in a way that doesn't affect other subscribers and the server must not have to keep track of what data subscribers have received. This makes FIFO useless for this purpose. Ironically a regular file will do exactly what you want because file descriptors on regular files keep track of file changes. You can combine this with overwrite which ensures all changes are published before a new overwrite occurs meaning you are only storing one message.

touch pubsub

tail -f pubsub | while read line; do echo $line; done
tail -f pubsub | while read line; do echo $line; done

echo "message" | cat > pubsub

You will get "file truncated" on standard error which is expected behavior but if you don't want to see it add 2> /dev/null

tail is actually doing everything read and echo do but its written like that because I assume you want to incorporate it in a script.