FIFO - Named Pipe - Linux - C

Hey there,

I want to create a fifo to pass informations from one process to another one. There will be many writers and one reader. My problem is, that the informations passed through the named pipe are interleaved (no border between messages) and so the reader can't identify what is send.

Example:

Many writer send per write the message "Hello" then it can happens:

HelloHello
or
Hello
Hello

On the reader side, if the reader only checks for "Hello", "HelloHello" can't be identified as 2 messages. Can I send a delimiter or is there an other solution?

thx

If you have 10 writers, why not just create 10 pipes. Your reader can read from all 10 of them and then there is no ambiguity about who said what.

The number of writers is not predefined. The writers come and go.

So then create additional named pipes as the writers come and go.

Or if you really want to just use one pipe that each writer writes to... then use a locking mechanism, the same way you would for files. Each of the writers that can possibly write to a resource first obtains a lock on the file and then writes. He then releases the lock as soon as he's done sending his message. In Linux and POSIX systems the locking system is well-defined and managed by the system, so you should be able to use this approach without coding your own locking mechanism.

Make each client prefix the message with some ident, so perhaps
ID1:Hello\n
ID2:Hello\n
ID3:World\n

Also, be aware of the value of PIPE_BUF on your system.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hell-student

I want to create a fifo to pass informations from one process to another one. There will be many writers and one reader.

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It sounds like a datagram socket would be a better fit. If the processes are related (one starts the others), then you can use socketpair() to create the sockets safely. Otherwise, better make them accessible via the filesystem, and use unix domain datagram sockets.