[Gllug] Named pipes

[Bruce Richardson]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 12:20:36PM +0000, Jason wrote:
> 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.

Trivially, I used one to right my own random sig generator.  For a more
practical use, our office mail system can use the same autentication
details for both (secure) IMAP and Authenticated SMTP (via tls,
naturally), because Exim can communicate with Courier's authdaemon via a
named pipe.  In the latter case, the advantage of using filesystem
semantics rather than some other method of IPC is that the sysadmin can
control access to this communication in a simple and familiar manner.

-- 
Bruce

Bitterly it mathinketh me, that I spent mine wholle lyf in the lists
against the ignorant.  -- Roger Bacon, "Doctor Mirabilis"
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