I'd like a way to run flowd in the foreground and print the binary logfile format to stdout.  This way, flowd could be more easily used as an input to a custom reader:

flowd --binary-to-stdout | custom-reader

This beats the domain socket solution in some cases, because there aren't issues with reader/writer synchronization on restarts.

After doing some work on this, I can see that it's easy to print to stderr, but stdout is closed (or dup'd to /dev/null) as part of the child process/privsep stuff, which I definitely don't understand.  So it does seem a little tricky.

If I get this working, I'll submit a patch.  But do you have any pointers about getting a working stdout?

Brian