On 08/24/2010 12:17 PM, John Reiser wrote: > Using fifos allows for arbitrary flexibility of "fanout multiplexing" > my interactive commands.
I'm not sure what is meant by "arbitrary flexibility", but of course a shell script that is using pipes can also decide dynamically which processes to start up and connect to the control channel, and what output these processes will generate, and (when there are multiple control channels) which control channels each such process will connect to. I take your point that named fifos provide a different style for creating networks of processes, a style that may be more convenient in many cases. However, for small examples pipes seem quite adequate, and for large examples mktemp -d seems to simplify the code. Also, mktemp -d would simplify administration of large scripts: I'd far rather see a small /tmp, one subdirectory per running script, than a /tmp filled with countless fifos and other temporary files. The bottom line is that so far we haven't seen a real example exhibiting a need for mktemp --fifo that can't be satisfied just as well with existing tools.
