mkfifo causes terminal to hang?

Question

Does mkfifo simply not work with Cygwin? A simple set of commands such as

$ mkfifo my_pipe

$ echo \"1234\" > my_pipe

just caus

Answer 1

No, you're not doing anything wrong with either of those commands, it's just your expectations are a little off.

What you're missing is something at the other end of that pipe, reading that data. This apparent hanging happens in Linux as well, so it's not a CygWin problem (or any sort of problem, really).

Just open up another window and enter:

cat <my_pipe

and you'll see the data appear, followed by the original echo completing.

Answer 2

The thing with named pipes is that you need to have something on both ends. You can't write into a pipe if it isn't complete yet, so the echo command hangs until something else tries to read from that pipe, which in your case never happens.