Ok, for anyone else (like me) who saw this and got interested - NTFS streams are not the answer.

When Stevie is asking about reading from IO streams, what he is specifically referring to is what in the *nix world would be stdin. This is normally attached to keyboard input but can be attched to the output of another program where the operating system supports pipes.

NTFS streams are not IO streams as most people understand them They are simply named file sections. You cannot use them to communicate between processes, or "pipe" information.

Note, KiXtart can read piped input using GetS, but it is kludgy and there is no way to reconnect input back to the keyboard.

Some ways of achieving this:
  • Support for named pipes would be interesting, however these are not fully supported under Win9x.
  • Anonymous pipes are another option. These are supported by (later) versions of Win9x, but passing the handle may be tricky.
  • KiXtart could read the script from stdin, and when the stream terminates reconnect stdin to the keyboard.
  • The decrypting program could pass the script directly to KiXtart via COM automation.