With named pipes you can let processes interact through different shells. Other than that they work like the ’normal’ pipe.

Create Named Pipe

Create a new named pipe like so:

[tux@server]$ mkfifo mypipe

You can also specify permissions

[tux@server]$ mkfifo mypipe -m700

Connect different Shells

You can redirect the output of a command into a named pipe like you are used to on Linux.

[tux@server]$ ls -l > mypipe

You can access the pipe in a different shell like so

[tux@server]$ cat < mypipe