Reading serialized objects

Hi. Basically I'm sending information over STDOUT from a Cocoa app to a Carbon tool.

In the Cocoa app, I serialize an NSDictionary, then find it's data size, send that size to the tool, and then send the actual data, like this:

// inFile = a file handle to STDIN of the child (tool) process

NSData *configData = [NSArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:anNSDictionary];

unsigned configDataSize = [configData length];

[inFile writeData:[NSData dataWithBytes:&configDataSize length:sizeof( unsigned )]];

[inFile writeData:configData];

Now on the other side, I can capture the SIZE of the dictionary, but reading the dictionary itself using only C and the Carbon APIs is proving difficult. Here is what I am doing (which works, but uses NSFileHandle and NSData):

unsigned sizeOfDict = 0;

if( read(0, &sizeOfDict, sizeof(unsigned)) != sizeof(unsigned) )

{

printf("Error reading sizeOfDict\n");

return -1;

}

NSFileHandle *fh = [NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardInput];

NSData *dictData = [fh readDataOfLength:sizeOfDict];

NSDictionary *dict = [NSUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:dictData];

CFDictionaryRef parametersDict;

parametersDict = (CFDictionaryRef)dict;

// now I have my dictionary.

How can I read this NSDictionary/CFDictionary into my tool using only C and Carbon APIs? Thank you. :)