This link was useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_pipe#Named_pipes_in_Windows
Named pipes in Windows In Windows, the design of named pipes is based towards client-server communication, and they work much like sockets, other than the usual read and write operations. Windows named pipes also support an explicit "passive" mode for server applications (compare: Unix domain sockets). Windows 95 supports named pipe clients, Windows NT based systems can also be servers. The named pipe can be accessed much like a file. Win32 SDK functions such as CreateFile, ReadFile, WriteFile and CloseHandle can be used to open, read from, write to, and close a pipe. There is no command line interface like Unix. Named pipes aren't permanent and can't be created as special files on any writable filesystem, unlike in Unix, but are volatile names (freed after the last reference to them is closed) allocated in the root directory of the named pipe filesystem (NPFS), mounted under the special path \\.\pipe\ (that is, a pipe named "foo" would have a full path name of \\.\pipe\foo). Anonymous pipes used in pipelining are actually named pipes with a random name. They are very rarely seen by users, but there are notable exceptions. The VMware Workstation PC hardware virtualization tool, for instance, can expose emulated serial ports to the host system as named pipes, and the WinDbg kernel mode debugger from Microsoft supports named pipes as a transport for debugging sessions (in fact, VMware and WinDbg can be coupled together - since WinDbg normally requires a serial connection to the target computer - letting driver developers do their development and testing on a single computer). Both programs require the user to enter names in the \\.\pipe\name form. 2009/12/9 Ken <kmai...@googlemail.com> > > That is excellent. It works perfectly! And I love being able to push the > citations from JabRef to LyX now! > > Some comments: > (1) The wiki probably needs updating with this information. > > (2) In the Additional Features document they write: > These are usually located in UserDir and have the names “lyxpipe.in” and > “lyxpipe.out” > with footnote: On Windows, local named pipes are special objects located in > \\.\pipe > > I did not see this footnote on first pass and assumed that lyxpipes were > regular files (esp. when I read that on Linux it looks like a regular > directory with /home/myhome/lyxpipe). This is the first time I have come > across pipes so it was quite a new concept to me. Perhaps the wiki could > make this a bit clearer and explain what is going on as it is not hard to set > this up, just confusing to a first time pipe user on Windows.
