MKFIFO(1)

💖 MKFIFO(1) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the mkfifo page — it lives in the General Commands Manual, and it's literally the glow-up you need when you want a named pipe. no cap. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

mkfifo — Create a FIFO with the given name.

like, it makes a named pipe. that's the whole vibe. 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

mkfifo [OPTION]... NAME...

so you give it some options (optional, obviously, it's giving low-maintenance) and then one or more NAMEs. periodt. 💅

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🫶 DESCRIPTION 🫶

Create a FIFO with the given name.

that's it. that's the description. a named pipe appears, you're the main character, the end. 👑

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -m, --mode <MODE> — file permissions for the fifo. yes queen, set your perms.
• -Z — set the SELinux security context to default type
• --context[=<CTX>] — like -Z, or if CTX is specified then set the SELinux or SMACK security context to CTX
• -h, --help — Print help
• -V, --version — Print version

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🔥 VERSION 🔥

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

okay bestie, the tldr girlies hooked us up with these, let's go. ✨

Create a named pipe at a given path:

mkfifo path/to/pipe

Send data through a named pipe and send the command to the background:

echo "Hello World" > path/to/pipe &

don't sleep on that &, it's the whole point — otherwise your shell just sits there waiting like 👁️👄👁️

Receive data through a named pipe:

cat path/to/pipe

Share your terminal session in real-time:

mkfifo path/to/pipe; script [-f|--flush] path/to/pipe

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.

like, some of these might not slay yet, it's a work in progress fr fr 😭 but we're rooting for them. 💜

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🌈 that's the whole page, you ate that. this was written up on 2026-09-25 and the version is v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0 — go make some pipes bestie, ily, bye 💖🧚✨