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On Monday 23 September 2002 07:34, you wrote:
> I had, at school today, the privaledge of being told "I'm wrong."
>
> I was told, by my instructor that a pipe is a _NOT_ a FIFO
>
> Can someone tell me how it couldn't be?
> Is there another perspective of a FIFO that I do not understand?
well, in the strictest terms, a pipe is a FIFO in that it is first in first
out. however, when talking pipes and FIFOs in UNIX, as sebastien noted, FIFOs
are synonomous with named pipes.
named pipes are assigned an externaly accessable address/name (e.g. a special
file in the file system) whereas anonymous pipes (or just "pipes") are only
really useful for internal communication (e.g. child/parent processes from a
fork()) as there is no address by which to access them externally ...
> Is the windows pipe the same as the Unix pipe?
no. they are implemented differently and have different behaviours ... the
windows (byte) "pipe" is more akin to the unix named pipe and has the
distinction of being rather slow. there are faster and better ways to
communicate on windows than pipes, all of which are unique to the windows OS
(surprise, surprise) ... windows pipes are more difficult to use and there is
no such thing as a truly anonymous pipe (all windows pipes are named, you
just don't get told the name in the case of an "anonymous" pipe)... also,
windows pipes are bidirectional over a single file handle (like writing to an
actual file), while UNIX pipes will give you two handles, one for each
direction ... windows pipes are also asynchronous, while UNIX pipes aren't
(they fill up and block)...
- --
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
- Albert Einstein
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