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  • +1 I think the processes pretty much always exist at the same time (otherwise the pipe is a little pointless -- you might as well just leave stuff in a regular file). These and unix domain sockets are often used by daemon services that can be controlled, eg, from the command line. If you look in /run on a linux desktop system you'll probably find a few of both (named fifos and unix sockets). It's a form of IPC. Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 12:10
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    @goldilocks: A named pipe is commonly used as a memory-resident ad-hoc mailbox between processes in embedded systems, where the communicating processes are short-lived and do not exist at the same time. The advantage is the simplicity of the implementation versus shared memory IPC and the fact that only RAM is used. The disadvantage is the non-persistence between boots and the byte-wise FIFO nature of the pipe versus the ability to use a structure with shared memory. Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 12:31
  • @jonathan: +1, I have some doubts:- why do we refer named pipes as FIFO ; what are persistant objects ? Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 16:23
  • @Ankit: Some people call a named pipe a FIFO because it behaves like a FIFO data structure, especially when opened for both reading and writing by a single process. By "persistent object" I meant that a named pipe is associated with a file system object. That is, it is a type of file, with a name, and it has the same persistence as any other file stored on the media. Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 17:26