Coalescing pipe allocation

[Dag-ErlingSmørgrav]

Peter Edwards <peter.edwards at openet-telecom.com> writes:
> How would one "shut down" one direction of the pipe and still maintain
> the other? I don't know how I can signal my intention not to read or
> write to the end I leave open...

man 2 shutdown

> Is this portability issue so ridiculously out of date that the comment
> in the pipe(2) manpage should be removed, or at least toned down?

No, POSIX only guarantees the traditional behaviour.  Bi-directional
pipes are a non-portable BSDism.

>                                                                   It
> seems silly to incur the costs of implementation you've mentioned and
> then recommend that the feature not be used.

It can still be useful for programs in the base system, which do not
need to be unconditionally portable to non-BSD systems.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no