Portable mknod ?? does it exist?

[Darrell Schiebel]

I have been attempting to write software utilizing named pipes on 
several hardware platforms.  The same code seems to behave differently
on each different platform. 

Sun (SunOS Release 4.0): 
     mknod works fine
     read blocks
Silicon Graphics (Iris 4D1-3.1D IP6):
     mknod works fine
     read does not block
DEC (Ultrix-32 V3.0):
     mknod works fine
     open fails with error "No such device or address" (ERRNO: 6)
HP (HP-UX):
     mknod fails with error "Invalid argument" (ERRNO: 22)

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this portable ?
Or an alternative to named pipes which is portable?

Here is the code snippet:

#include <errno.h>
#ifdef ULTRIX
#include <fcntl.h>
#else
#include <sys/fcntl.h>
#endif
#define FIFONAME     "myfifo"
#define PERMS        0000666
#define FIFO         0010000  /* = S_IFIFO */

main(){
  char buffer[200];
  int pipe;

    if (mknod(FIFONAME, FIFO | PERMS, 0) == -1) {
      printf("ERRNO: %d\n",errno);
      perror("writer: mknod failed");
      exit(1);}
    else printf("myfifo created\n");

    if ((pipe = open(FIFONAME,O_RDWR)) == -1){
      printf("ERRNO: %d\n",errno);
      perror("Open Failed");
      exit(1);}

    if (read(pipe, buffer, 20)< 0){
      printf("ERRNO: %d\n",errno);
      perror("Read Failed");}}

Any Responses Would be Appreciated.

Darrell Schiebel
--------------------------------------
Concurrent Engineering Research Center
West Virginia University

drs at cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu
drs at g.cs.wvu.wvnet.edu
drs at baks.com