I am writing a shell scrip that will run one program that will setup a FIFO output pipe and wait for another program to open it, and then open the other program on that output pipe (using it as a file input). My question is how do you setup a script to open one program, and while that program is running open another one in a different window?

To start a program in another window, you should be able to run something like: myshell "whatever command" So if the shell you use is 'bash', then it might look like this: /usr/bin/bash myprog You'll want to run this in the background so that you'll get command prompt back so that you can start the first program: /usr/bin/bash myprog & Now you should be able to start the first program. If you have a problem because "myprog" is failing because the pipe doesn't exist yet, then start it in a script with some type of pause or sleep in it. Be sure to come back and let us know if our suggestions helped!

You could probably use xterm as well, eg: $ xterm -e top &