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
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