I feel like named pipes are the great unrealized feature of Unix. Somehow people never really got educated about them, so they don't even think to reach for them. This is "elegant weapon from a more civilized age" territory. - ThreadSky

shriram.bsky.social • 9 days ago

I feel like named pipes are the great unrealized feature of Unix. Somehow people never really got educated about them, so they don't even think to reach for them. This is "elegant weapon from a more civilized age" territory.

Reposted from Marc-André Moreau

Local web apps could work so much better if HTTP over named pipes were a commonly supported thing. Instead of relying on integrated Windows authentication, you could just... spin up a web server on a named pipe and connect a browser to it, allowing only specific local users without explicit auth

Comments

tavis.damnsimple.com•9 days ago

The blocking semantics can be fun to play with https://gist.github.com/tavisrudd/6237770 . Seeing much more use of Unix domain sockets recently

shriram.bsky.social•8 days ago

Ha, that's cute! The `sleep` is essential to making it well-formed.

dfeldman.org•9 days ago

OR … hear me out… if it’s a local network socket (loopback) you should be able to get process table details of the caller. Then you could have multiple microservices running on the same machine and all identifying each other.

cscheid.net•8 days ago

It’s worse.

Developers don’t know about them either, so cli apps aren’t generally prepared to deal with them these days (nor are they built to be agnostic to their presence)

The default user experience sucks, which further pushes the incentives away from named pipes.

Sad stuff

stip.bsky.social•9 days ago

in my first job out of college, I discovered named pipes and used them in script on a shared server. I was so stoked that I named the pipe `i_am_the_greatest`. the server later got hacked (unrelated to my script) and the company had to do an audit. "hey Mike, what is "i_am_the_greatest all about?"

shriram.bsky.social•8 days ago

This is very much "My named pipe is raising many questions answered by my named pipe" territory.

aussiedingo.bsky.social•9 days ago

Tbh I never learned about them...

benshapi.ro•9 days ago

As an undergrad I built an extension for Xorg that let you create new input drivers (mouse, tablet, etc.) in separate processes, with whatever tooling you wanted. The little input driver daemons communicated with the Xorg extension via named pipes. The idea was inspired by Mach :)

benshapi.ro•9 days ago

I was bummed when, after I graduated, a new student dumped it all and just wrote a regular x11 extension in C.

Still seems nuts to me that an input driver should be in a process that can write to arbitrary memory…

shriram.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yes, this! The in-memory counterpart of the thread ending here.
https://bsky.app/profile/joepolitz.bsky.social/post/3lriub3lks322

sriku.org•9 days ago

Also zmq lets you use named pipes for a variety of purposes pretty much on par with other modes, though zmq is not designed to do things like a http server.

sriku.org•9 days ago

Weird that as a student and early programmer I used them a lot more than now and have wondered about it now & then. The auth part is the big win. For ex: I use it to launch tmux sessions that a group can share access to. `tmux -S ...` and set perms on ``.

shriram.bsky.social•8 days ago

Me too. I barely use them now. But then again I don't use the shell as much now, and tend to use it in pretty routine, scripted ways.

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