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From: hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: named pipes?
Message-ID: <15973@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 17:12:17 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.15973
Posted: Mon Oct 26 17:12:17 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Oct-87 22:30:07 EST
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 20


I keep tripping over code in our kernels that talks about FIFO's and
named pipes.  Well, we finally had an application where we could use
such a thing, so I went looking for the documentation.  I am unable to
find any mentions of FIFO or named pipes anywhere in our System V
release 2 documentation, or in the Pyramid or Sun man pages, except
for one place: mknod tells you how to create one.  However it would be
nice to have something in section 4 that talks about the semantics,
with a nice title line so that man -k could locate it.  I assume this
is a System V feature, since it isn't in the 4.3 version of mknod.
The following simple test works on Sun, Pyramid, and Ultrix, so I can
sort of guess what it must be doing:

mknod foo p    
cat foo >/dev/tty &
cat .login >foo

.login comes out the terminal, and the background job finishes at
the end.  (This shows that EOF on one side is propagated to the
other.) Anybody know where the documentation is hiding?