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Both pipes and sockets are files, in the sense that they can appear on the filesystem. Some people refer to pipe(2) pipes as anonymous pipes — they're anonymous

Both pipes and sockets are files, in the sense that they can appear on the filesystem. Some people refer to pipe(2) pipes as anonymous pipes — they're anonymous because they're not in the filesystem. (One in there is a "named" pipe.) (I do sort of wish most object creation in the FS was a pair of, int fd = create_a_file_descriptor_of_some_type(); link_fd(fd, "/the/name/for/it"); I think that'd be a cleaner abstraction, and then introduce syscalls on top of that for doing them together in case you think that's too much user/kernel traffic.)

kevincox 3y ago
Linux does have the O_TMPFILE flag to open. This creates a file with no name. But importantly it still needs a directory path because it needs to know which filesystem the data should be stored on. With your example if you wrote a few gigs of data to that fd before linking it the kernel would need to either buffer it (maybe swapping it out) or guess and then copy the data when it guesses wrong.