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named pipes
Authored by: fracai on Sep 30, '04 03:10:35PM

I think I'll type up a submission for this after work.

named pipes provide piping support for apps that don't support piping.
for example, you can't pipe the output of mplayer to standard out, so it's hard to redirect converted audio to another app without saving the audio to disk first. instead you can creat a named pipe and save the mplayer output to the pipe and have the second app read from the pipe.

for something like this it saves the hassle of some temp files.

another example, I created a script a short time ago that would dump the real audio stream of a radio program, convert the dump to wav, convert the wav to mp3

there is a wasted dump and wav file now. both of which can take up a significant amount of space, the wav especially.
a named pipe (allong with doing the conversion of the audio with mplayer instead of saving the dump and then converting) allowed me to direct the wav output to a pipe that was being read by lame. this eliminated the biggest temp file, the wav.

I'll write up something intelligable with links after work.

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