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    Can you explain why you need it to be a pipe, instead of forking a subprocess (with a script, or whatever) and reading stdout from this subprocess whenever you'd "access the file"? The condition "update output everytime I read" doesn't match the "a file is a stream of bytes" abstraction particularly well. Commented Mar 19, 2017 at 10:30
  • "everytime I read" sounds more like a network service one would connect to, not a filesystem object Commented Mar 19, 2017 at 14:50
  • Is there any reason something like netdata wouldn't work to get the statistics you need? That has the added advantage that it gives you charts of the statistics over however long of a period you tell it to retain data for. Commented Aug 17, 2017 at 19:22
  • Hey... I'm looking for a solution like this too. My use case is that I have a open-source program (Kibana, in this case) that wants to read a configuration file. I need to generate the file dynamically, when kibana reads its configuration. Sockets are out of the question as they can't be opened like regular files, and modifying kibana is also out. I've a few other programs that I need to treat similarly. Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 17:25