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Named Pipes

  • A named pipe can be used to communicate between processes.

  • A named pipe can be created with the following:

    sh mkfifo

  • It is important to note that writing to a named pipe will fail or at best hang unless something is also reading from the pipe

  • Named pipes can be used to create circular communications between applications too. This can be used, for example, to allow a scripted agent to communicate with a prompt-like process.

    sh mkfifo fifo cat fifo | tee fifo

    In this example, the first process (cat) is reading from fifo and outputting to stdin. The second process (tee) is reading stdin and writing it to tty as well as back to fifo, closing the loop * Note that stdin/stdout may be buffered and interfere with this loop. To fix this, you can use stdbuf -i0 -o0 as a prefix to the second process.