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Can you explain what a named pipe .plan would do?

In college, if you would finger me, you would see an ASCII-art animation of the iconic motorcycle jump shot from Terminator 2 for 10 seconds.

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Finger basically just reads that file so if it’s a named pipe you can have a process generate content on the fly.

How does the process know that you're reading the pipe? Does it just, like, write a hundred copies of the desired output with EOFs in between so that it can be read multiple times?

The process writing to the pipe just blocks until another process starts reading from said pipe.

Ah, right, I was misremembering how FIFOs work. You can't even write to it until a reader opens it. I was thinking that you could just dump data on it and the operating system would buffer it until someone came along to read it.

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