---- Original Message ----
> From Nigel Horne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Thursday, 02 Oct 2003, 07:08
>
> Actually pipes *are* temporary files, but we won't get OT with that.

Erm, not on Linux.  Well not in the 'anything getting written to disk'
sense, processes get file descriptors for each end and the kernel simply
throws data from one buffer to another.  This is much more efficient,
but means you can't use llseek or similar when reading from a pipe -
which means that some programs don't work on pipes when they will work
on 'normal' files.

Under MS-DOS the data does actually get written to a temporary file
which is not good from a performance point of view (and means that files
may not get deleted if/when things crash).  Oh, and under DOS the second
process doesn't get executed until the first one has totally finished ..  
which limits the usefullness of piping.  You're beginning to see why
people rarely used ipes under DOS :).  I'm not sure how the various
versions of Windows have improved upon this sorry state of affairs.

-- 
Stephen White


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