If I remember correctly, this work was an end of semester advanced OS/Networking class presentation. I picked Pipes, others picked the filesystem, device drivers, CUDA, process scheduling etc. For the master’s thesis, my work was on active indoor localization and tracking (early work before indoor Google maps was launched).

Re: your second question, I guess you’re referring to identifying a FIFO on the filesystem - that’s a simple ls -la - FIFOs show up as regular files with the p attribute. For procfs or sysfs - just ls /proc or ls /sys

Man page: http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~dicke3/nerspcs/ls.html

You should see the p attribute for FIFOs on the filesystem. Sysfs and procfs map onto internal (in-memory) kernel data structures, so those might just show up as regular files in the “virtual” filesystem. So cat, grep etc. on these files will be just reads/writes from/to the appropriate memory space in the kernel or for read only files, they may be “code generated output” that allows for inspection of some internal state in the kernel.