Topic: Unix

A "named pipe" -- also known as a FIFO (First In, First Out) or just fifo -- is an inter-process communication mechanism that makes use of the filesystem to allow two processes to communicate with each other. In particular, it allows one of these to open one end of the pipe as a reader, and the other to open it as a writer. This article take a look at the FIFO and how you can use it.

Daemon News has an interesting article which explains some key Qt concepts, shows you how to create an example Qt program, and demonstrates how easy it is to program with Qt. This article is from the perspective of a FreeBSD developer, but the majority of it is suitable for those on any platform.

Instead of using temporary files in shell scripts, you could use named pipes or fifos (First-In, First-Out). In this article, Nathaniel Donat, defines named pipes, introduces Bourne script build.ss using named pipes, and finally, directs us to some Unix Interprocess Communication (IPC) resources on the Internet

Linux Gazette has a new article on optimizing GCC : "I have a Pentium 3 866MHZ CPU. After reading the freshmeat article on optimizing GCC a few days ago, it got me thinking. So I posed the following question: How much faster would gcc compile the kernel if gcc itself was optimized? I chose to benchmark kernel compilation times, because I think it is a good benchmark, and many other people also use it to benchmark system performance. Also, at one point or another, most Linux users will have to take the step and compile the kernel, so I thought I'd benchmark something that is useful and something that people have a general idea of how long it takes to compile without optimizations."

In this document the author tries to explain how to install the Intel Fortran 90 Compiler v 6.0 in FreeBSD with Linux emulation. This document could be useful for people that are doing large numerical simulations, since the Intel Compiler works really fine, and has support for SSE, SSE2, etc...

Since a lot of coders are curious about improving the quality of software out there, here is a brief list of secure programming resources.

The Linux Journal has published an article giving an introduction to using and developing for X11.

"The X Window System was specifically designed to allow the graphical output of a program running on one machine to appear on a different machine, possibly one that is physically remote and/or a different make and architecture. In other words, X11 was designed to be a platform-independent, networked graphics framework. In X11 parlance, the "display" denotes the box on which the graphical output will appear. Interestingly, an individual display is defined by the X11 documentation as having exactly one keyboard and one pointer (i.e., mouse), but potentially multiple CPUs, monitors, etc."

IBM developerWorks has relaunched the GNOMEnclature column. This first article takes a developer's look at what's new with the upcoming GNOME 2 platform, based on GTK+ 2.

Linuxfocus.org has an article which gives an introduction to writing shell scripts. The article describes the ins and outs of shell scripts and provides a number of examples to get you started writing your own.