MKFIFO(1) General Commands Manual MKFIFO(1)

mkfifo — make FIFO special files

mkfifo [-m mode] file...

The mkfifo utility shall create the FIFO special files specified by the operands, in the order specified.

For each file operand, the mkfifo utility shall perform actions equivalent to the mkfifo(3) function defined in the System Interfaces volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), called with the following arguments:

  1. The file operand is used as the argument.
  2. The value of the bitwise-inclusive OR of S_IRUSR, S_IWUSR, S_IRGRP, S_IWGRP, S_IROTH, and S_IWOTH is used as the mode argument. (If the -m option is specified, the value of the mkfifo(3) mode argument is unspecified, but the FIFO shall at no time have permissions less restrictive than the -m mode option-argument.)

The mkfifo utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), xbd_chap12(7).

The following option shall be supported:

Set the file permission bits of the newly-created FIFO to the specified mode value. The mode option-argument shall be the same as the mode operand defined for the utility. In the symbolic_mode strings, the op characters '+' and '-' shall be interpreted relative to an assumed initial mode of a = rw .

The following operand shall be supported:

file
A pathname of the FIFO special file to be created.

Not used.

None.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of mkfifo:

Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
[ XSI] Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

Default.

Not used.

The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

None.

None.

The following exit values shall be returned:

All the specified FIFO special files were created successfully.
An error occurred.

Default.

None.

None.

This utility was added to permit shell applications to create FIFO special files.

The -m option was added to control the file mode, for consistency with the similar functionality provided by the mkdir(1) utility.

Early proposals included a -p option similar to the mkdir(1) -p option that created intermediate directories leading up to the FIFO specified by the final component. This was removed because it is not commonly needed and is not common practice with similar utilities.

The functionality of mkfifo is described substantially through a reference to the mkfifo(3) function in the System Interfaces volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”). For example, by default, the mode of the FIFO file is affected by the file mode creation mask in accordance with the specified behavior of the mkfifo(3) function. In this way, there is less duplication of effort required for describing details of the file creation.

None.

chmod(1), umask(1), the System Interfaces volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), mkfifo(3)

First released in Issue 3.

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January 1, 2004 posix.fail