Named Pipe
What is a Named Pipe?
Named pipes are one alternative that is used to directly transfer data from a point of origin to a point of termination. This is one of the fundamental features that make Linux and other Unices useful is the “pipe”. This approach tends to prevent the requirement of going by some type of mediating protocol or process.
In computing, a referred pipe is an extension to the traditional pipe concept on UNIX and Unix-like systems, and is one of the methods of inter-process communication. It is also called as a FIFO for its behavior.
Benefits of Named Pipes
Named pipes are very simple to use.
MKFIFO is a thread-safe function.
No synchronization mechanism is required when using named pipes.
Write to a named pipe is guaranteed to be atomic. It is atomic even if the named pipe is opened in non-blocking mode.
Named pipes have permissions related with them, unlike anonymous pipes. These permissions can be used to enforce secure communication.
Limitations of Named Pipes
Due to their basic blocking nature of pipes, careful programming is required for the client and server, in order to avoid deadlocks.
Named pipes can only be used for communication among processes on the same host machine.
Named pipe data is a byte stream, and no record identification exists.
Named pipes can be created only in the local file system of the host, that is, you cannot create a named pipe on the NFS file system.
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