[Gllug] Named pipes

[Jason Clifford]

On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 11:32 +0000, Toby Waterford wrote:
> I've worked out how to use unnamed pipes and I finding them very
> useful. I may be being dim, but named pipes completely confuse me -
> are they useful? Does anyone have any advice on getting to grips with
> them?

They are very very useful in my experience.

Using them is easy. Just use mkfifo to create the file (a fifo/named
pipe is just a persistent pipe in the form of an entry in the
filesystem) and use it as any other file.

One example of usage for this is the system I had in place to authorise
access to customers based upon their connection state (whether connected
via our dialup or broadband or other unforeseen methods) where I
occasionally needed to dump in additional data without interrupting the
existing process. All I needed to do was write data to the fifo and I
knew the processing reading it would get the extra data without worrying
about missing data from the persistent source.



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