Named Pipes (FIFOs)
by Mostafa on May.22, 2007, under How To ..., Linux
A named pipe is a special kind of file on *nix systems that can be used for inter-process communication. They behave like FIFOs and are created using the command “mkfifo“:
$ mkfifo mypipe
$ ls -l mypipe
prw-rw-r-- 1 xxx xxx 0 May 22 10:18 mypipe
The “p” in the attributes list indicates that this is indeed a pipe.
A trivial example of its use may be to redirect the output of a command on a remote server to a pipe and then reading from that pipe from another host via ssh.
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