Agreed, every time I've used a named pipe in a shellscript it's caused me nothing but pain. IIRC, they're guaranteed not to interleave write()s less than PIPE_

Agreed, every time I've used a named pipe in a shellscript it's caused me nothing but pain. IIRC, they're guaranteed not to interleave write()s less than PIPE_BUF (4k?) but if your program is buffering internally it might not end writes on a newline.