Regular pipe vs. Named Pipe

[John F Haugh II]

In article <1991Jun13.143802.3600 at chinet.chi.il.us> les at chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>In article <25101:Jun1217:29:0291 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>>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.
>
>Does "anything" include open()?  And by more machines, do you mean
>more types of machine or more existing machines?  I'd guess that
>386's running SysVr3 or Xenix are the biggest chunk of the unix
>market right now and they won't have sockets unless they come with
>an add-on TCP/IP package.

Dan's statement is pretty much a bunch of nonsense.  Since named
pipes predate the current variety of message queues [ or at least
are no newer than ... ] there are at least as many systems which
support named pipes as support System V message queues - and
remember than BSD didn't have the same message quees as System V,
so screw the issue of BSD sockets.

Named pipes can be implemented with a virtual device driver, in
fact this is one of the first device drivers I ever wrote, and
exactly because I didn't have an IPC mechanism on the platform
I was using.  Since named pipes can be simulated with a device
driver, and since all UNIX's have device drivers, Dan's statement
falls flat.
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