Named Pipe
One of the strengths of Unix has always been inter-process communication. Amongst the facilities provided by the OS are so-called pipes. These pipes connect the output of one Unix process to the input of another. This is fine if both processes are living in the same parent process space, started by the same user. There are however circumstances where the communicating processes must use named pipes. One such circumstance is that the processes have to be executed under different user names and permissions.
These named pipes are special files that can exist anywhere in the file system. These named pipe special files are made with the command mkfifo as in mkfifo mypipe.
A named pipe is marked with a p as the first letter of the mode string, e.g.
Read more about this topic: Unix File Types
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