General question on the status of named pipes

Nathan Thern nthern@gmail.com
Mon Oct 24 18:47:00 GMT 2011


On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:
> Actually, named pipes have _never_ worked, at least according to the full
> set of POSIX rules.  It's just that some releases had code that limped along
> better than in other releases for the particular use cases you happened to
> throw at them.  cgf is working miracles to get it as far along as he has,
> but it's a very tough job to emulate POSIX fifos on top of windows.

Interesting. I used them successfully for a couple of years with 1.5,
IIRC. My mode of usage was usually something like:

$ mkfifo fifo1 fifo2

$ decode_audio_to_PCM audiofile | tee fifo1 > fifo2 &

$ encode_audio_to_format_1 -o newaudio1 fifo1

$ encode_audio_to_format_2 -o newaudio2 fifo2

This has two distinct advantages over tempfiles for me. I don't have
to wait for the decode to complete before I start to re-encode & I
don't need the disk space for large chunks of uncompressed audio.

NT

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