Expand description
Creating and using FIFO files, which are also known as “named pipes” but totally different from named pipes on Windows.
On Windows, named pipes can be compared to Unix domain sockets: they can have multiple duplex connections on a single path, and the data can be chosen to either preserve or erase the message boundaries, resulting in a reliable performant implementation of TCP and UDP working in the bounds of a single machine. Those Unix domain sockets are also implemented by interprocess – see the udsocket module for that.
On Linux, named pipes, referred to as “FIFO files” in this crate, are just files which can have a writer and a reader communicating with each other in one direction without message boundaries. If further readers try to open the file, they will simply read nothing at all; if further writers are connected, the data mixes in an unpredictable way, making it unusable. Therefore, FIFOs are to be used specifically to conveniently connect two applications through a known path which works like a pipe and nothing else.
§Usage
The create_fifo function serves for a FIFO file creation. Opening FIFO files works via the standard Files, opened either only for writing or only for reading. Deleting works the same way as with any regular file, via the remove_file function.
Functions§
- create_
fifo - Creates a FIFO file at the specified path with the specified permissions.