3 ms·
I have one of the original tilde.club accounts. It was a fun moment, when a bunch of folks re-experienced (or experienced) the first time the pleasure of a shar
by NelsonMinar 7y ago
I have one of the original tilde.club accounts. It was a fun moment, when a bunch of folks re-experienced (or experienced) the first time the pleasure of a shared Unix system. Just like the Old Ones had in college. When finger was social media, and "who" worked, and if you were really cool your .plan was a named pipe. It worked because it was nostalgic and because its sysop Paul Ford is a first class human being. Never occurred to me it'd be an idea with longevity.
- bravura 7y agoCan you explain what a named pipe .plan would do? In college, if you would finger me, you would see an ASCII-art animation of the iconic motorcycle jump shot from Terminator 2 for 10 seconds.
- burke 7y agoFinger basically just reads that file so if it’s a named pipe you can have a process generate content on the fly.
- brianpgordon 7y agoHow does the process know that you're reading the pipe? Does it just, like, write a hundred copies of the desired output with EOFs in between so that it can be read multiple times?
- alt219 7y agoThe process writing to the pipe just blocks until another process starts reading from said pipe.
- brianpgordon 7y agoAh, right, I was misremembering how FIFOs work. You can't even write to it until a reader opens it. I was thinking that you could just dump data on it and the operating system would buffer it until someone came along to read it.