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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: Regular pipe vs. Named Pipe
Message-ID: <25101:Jun1217:29:0291@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 91 17:29:02 GMT
References: <14079@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <14192:Jun923:16:0791@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <2736@root44.co.uk>
Organization: IR
Lines: 17

In article <2736@root44.co.uk> gwc@root.co.uk (Geoff Clare) writes:
> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> >Basically, pipes work the same way everywhere, and named pipes don't.
> >The name part of named pipes is their least portable aspect. Never use
> >them in a long-lived program if you can use any other communications
> >mechanism.
> Apart from the fact that Dan obviously didn't mean what he wrote here
> ("any other communications mechanism" would include a mechanism specific
> to one system, and therefore totally non-portable),

I meant what I wrote. A program which supports message queues and
UNIX-domain sockets will work correctly on far more machines than a
program which supports named pipes. In fact, a program which does
anything with named pipes that couldn't be done with pipes is almost
certainly going to fail on one of (A) SunOS; (B) Ultrix; (C) SVR4.

---Dan