Regular pipe vs. Named Pipe

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <19382 at rpp386.cactus.org> jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes:
> 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.

That's the most logical argument I've heard from you in a while, John.
Parts of it are even grammatical. Anyway, that last bit makes absolutely
no sense: a program supporting named pipes and message queues will miss
at least 50,000 pure-BSD mainframes on the Internet alone. To handle
them (and their millions of users) a program had better support sockets.

As for System V named pipes versus System V message queues, with the
advent of POSIX you can't even depend on the old named pipe semantics.
Programs which actually want to work should use message queues instead.

> 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.

That's ridiculous. The average UNIX sysadmin is not going to muck around
with the kernel just so he can run a program that only supports named
pipes. Your statements will match reality only if and when every UNIX
system in the world has been given a Haugh-approved facelift.

---Dan