Use named pipes (or something else) as in-memory files

I've been going through the WinAPI documentation for a while, but I don't seem to be able to find an answer. What I'm trying to achieve is to give a program a file name that it can open and work with it like that would be a normal file on the disk. But I want this object to be in the memory.

I tried using named pipes and they work in some of the situations, but not always. I create a named pipe and pass it to th开发者_开发百科e child process as a regular file. When process exists I collect the data from the pipe.

program.exe \\.\pipe\input_pipe

Faced some limitations though. One of them is that they are not seekable. The second limitation is that they should be opened with exactly the right permissions. And the third one I found is that you cannot pre-put any data into a duplex pipe before it's been open on the other end. Is there any way to overcome those limitations of the named pipes?

Or maybe there is some other kind of object that could be opened with CreateFile and then accessed with ReadFile and WriteFile. So far the only solution I see is to create a file system driver and implement all the functionality myself.

Just to make it clear I wanted to point out that I cannot change the child program I'm running. The main idea is to give that program something that it would think is a normal file.

UPDATE: I'm not looking for a solution that involves installation of any external software.

Memory-mapped files would allow you to do what you want.

EDIT:

On rereading the question - since the receiving program already uses CreateFile/ReadFile/WriteFile and cannot be modified, this will not work. I cannot think of a way to do what OP wants outside of third-party or self-written RAMDisk solution.

The simplest solution might be, as you seem to suggest, using a Ramdisk to make a virtual drive mapped to memory. Then obviously, any files you write to or read from that virtual drive will be completely contained in RAM (assuming it doesn't get paged to disk).

I've done that a few times myself to speed up a process that was entirely disk-bound.

Call CreateFile but with FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY and probably FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE as well.

The file will then never hit the disk unless the system is low on physical memory.