Alexander Henry said:
> Seen on man cp --help
>
>   -r                           copy recursively, non-directories as files
>                                  WARNING: use -R instead when you might
> copy
>                                  special files like FIFOs or /dev/zero
>
> WTF is a FIFO?
>

FIFO = First In First Out, AKA a Named Pipe.  These are made with the
mkfifo command.

Basically, it works like a regular pipe (e.g. ps -ef  | less ), except
that you can connect different unrelated processes to it.

For example:

mknod test
cat /etc/hosts > test
more test

This is used for some handy things, like making your .signature a named
pipe and then connecting a random signature program to it, so whenever you
read from .signature, you get a random line.


-- 
Jason Santos
jason.santos@megaslow.net