Can I read the text from an exe file in c?

Question

I have two games I created in c:

The first is a guess the number game: the computer chooses a number and the user has to guess it.

The second does the opposite: the user chooses a number and the computer has to guess it through feedback from the user (h or l)

Now I want to make the two programs play with each other. for example: I open the two programs and the first takes an input from the second and then provides the value to it.

I have found that it is possible to do this indirectly using a text file:

 #include<stdio.h>
 #include<unistd.h>
 #include<stdlib.h>


 int main()
 { 
   char line[260]
   FILE *fp;
   fp = fopen("file.txt", "r+");
   if(fr == NULL){ printf("File not found");}
   fscanf("%s", line);

     fclose(fr);
    return 0;
   }

And I would use sleep to make sure the program reads the correct data. But I don't like this way: I will have to view the results after the game is over. Is there a way I can make this work: like seeing the results while the game is on? Is it possible to read and write to an .exe file?

Answer 1

Probably the easiest way is to connect both programs by two pipes. There is plenty of examples creating two pipes and forking a subprocess. You may want to have a look on the function popen and also popen2 for bidirectional communication which was presented for example here.