I have recently approached an issue where I must retreive data from a descriptor. The data is populated into the descriptor by the program which will run the php script. I have searched for ways to read the descriptor, but have failed as most of the read() functions appear to be geared around files. Also, I was hoping to avoid running the external program from within the php script with proc_open in order to obtain this data. So a general run down of how this will work, is this: /sbin/external_prog /sbin/script.php external_prog pushes data into the descriptor, and script.php needs to pull the data.