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pipectl - a simple named pipe management utility

pipectl is a tool to create and manage short-lived named pipes that can be used to e.g. control a longer-lived program using short commands from elsewhere in the system without needing a complex IPC mechanism such as UNIX domain sockets.

Features

• Create a named pipe using pipectl -o | long-running-program
• Send something to that program's stdin using echo "input line" | pipectl -i
• Create multiple named pipes simultaneously by naming them with --name or -n
• Create a named pipe at a custom path by using --path or -p
• Cleans up after itself when the program exits and removes the pipe
• Allows synchronizing writes to the pipe with the --lock or -l option

Usage

usage: pipectl [options]

options:
  -h, --help    show this help
  -o, --out     create a pipe and print its contents to stdout
  -i, --in      write stdin to an open pipe
  -n, --name N  use a pipe with a custom name instead of the default
  -p, --path P  use a custom path P for the pipe created by pipectl
  -f, --force   force create a pipe even if one already exists
  -l, --lock    use flock(2) to synchronize writes to the pipe
  -v, --verbose print debug messages on stderr

Environment Variables

pipectl will use the environment variables XDG_RUNTIME_PATH and TMPDIR to discover the preferred directory for the named pipes created by it. If both are unset, pipectl falls back to placing the pipe in /tmp.

Installation

pipectl is already packaged in many distros and can be installed via the package manager:

Dependencies

• CMake
• scdoc (for man pages)

Building

• Run cmake -B build
• Run cmake --build build

Files

• src/main.c: the whole program

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3.0 or later (SPDX GPL-3.0-or-later). The full license text can also be found in the LICENSE file.