Regular pipe vs. Named Pipe

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <14192:Jun923:16:0791 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:

>Pipes are part of UNIX. Named pipes aren't.

And I thought that only AT&T could decide what was a part of UNIX.  Hmmm.

>Named pipes are
>formalized by POSIX, with a slightly different behavior from that in any
>existing system.

Can you elaborate on these differences?

>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.

Under SysV they seem to be the only thing that works across RFS without
special programming.   And in general they are the only IPC that can
be used directly in shell scripts.  Are you predicting that this is going
to go away in future releases?

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us