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From: domo@riddle.UUCP (Dominic Dunlop)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: named pipes?
Message-ID: <507@riddle.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-Oct-87 05:36:30 EST
Article-I.D.: riddle.507
Posted: Thu Oct 29 05:36:30 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Nov-87 04:46:28 EST
References: <15973@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: domo@riddle.UUCP (Dominic Dunlop)
Organization: Sphinx Ltd., Maidenhead, England
Lines: 39

In article <15973@topaz.rutgers.edu> hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu
(Charles Hedrick) writes:
>  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.

The facts are pretty boring and pretty typical of UN*X documentation: the
major source of documentation for FIFOs is read(2) and write(2).  If you
have a SVID, edition 2, volume 1, you will at least find these and other
entries referenced against FIFO in the index.

FIFOs (named pipes) are definitely poor relations of any other IPC
mechanism as far as ``how to'' literature is concerned: most authors say
words to the effect of ``FIFOs exist'' and leave it at that.  Even AT&T's
_System V Programmer's Guide_ (Prentice Hall, 1987), which discusses file
locking, messages, semaphores and shared memory at great length, does not
mention them at all.  But then, it doesn't tell us how to use pipes either.
We all know how to use pipes, right?  (This book is well worth having in
most other respects.)

One of the few practical programming examples of  I've seen is in _UNIX System
Programming_ by Ben Salama and Keith Haviland (Addison Wesley, 1987).
[A section I reviewed at the draft stage -- while standing in the aliens
line at immigration at Newark airport, I seem to recall...]
Does anybody know of any others?

AT&T has made something of a big deal of the fact that RFS supports access
to FIFOs on remote processors, making them very useful for the simple
implementation of remote execution daemons and such -- you can even do it
with shell scripts.  Of course, distributed applications written this way
won't currently port to the BSD universe...  But where's this documented?
I can't seem to put my hands on the right manual...



-- 
Dominic Dunlop
domo@sphinx.co.uk  domo@riddle.uucp