This is more of a UNIX question then a Csound
question, but I am interested in furthering
the discussion about handling floating point
wave files.

Now that .wav floats are supported, I am trying
to put together a couple of shell wrappers that
will make manipulating and playing them a bit
easier to handle.

I came up with this script as a cheap floating
point sound player:

        SCALE_AMOUNT=`scale $1 | grep 'Max scale factor' | cut -d'='
-f2`
        scale -W -s -o/dsp -F$SCALE_AMOUNT $1 &
        vplay /dsp

where '/dsp' is a fifo which is world r/w-able.
When I attempt this, scale dies with 'error writing Wave header'.

I don't understand why, because I can do this:

        cp sound.wav /dsp &
        vplay /dsp

This plays the sound.  I don't like the idea of temp files as much,
because of the disk space requirements, and the lack of a
synchronization
between the processes such as the fifo provides.  

What might be nice would be the filename trick that csound uses to 
pipe to a process (-o '|vplay').  Any other suggestions?

Thanks

Toby