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URL:
https://askubuntu.com/q/1080717
Title:
Is `/dev/shm` universal in Linux and Ubuntu?
ID:
/2018/10/03/Is-__dev_shm_-universal-in-Linux-and-Ubuntu_
Created:
October 3, 2018
Edited: June 12, 2020
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For FIFO pipe speed I’m considering placing it inside the RAM disk called /dev/shm. I see there are some files there already:
$ ll /dev/shm
total 1536
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 280 Oct 2 17:19 ./
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4840 Oct 2 05:49 ../
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 04:29 pulse-shm-1087740037*
-rwx------ 1 lightdm lightdm 67108904 Oct 2 04:29 pulse-shm-1609193682*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 04:34 pulse-shm-2114917541*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 04:29 pulse-shm-2616701246*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 17:14 pulse-shm-3211887872*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 17:14 pulse-shm-3411101615*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 04:32 pulse-shm-3740841284*
-rwx------ 1 lightdm lightdm 67108904 Oct 2 04:29 pulse-shm-4039050064*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 04:29 pulse-shm-608722223*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 05:46 pulse-shm-629296834*
-rwx------ 1 rick rick 67108904 Oct 2 17:19 pulse-shm-791566179*
-rwx------ 1 lightdm lightdm 67108904 Oct 2 04:29 pulse-shm-871250926*
Is it safe to assume this directory is universal on all Ubuntu systems or even better all Linux systems?
If the directory doesn’t exist I’ll create my pipe FIFO file in /tmp but hopefully that never happens.
Edit: With many thanks to two great answers written below I found this article: Why use named pipes on Linux
Why use named pipes?
Named pipes are used infrequently for a good reason. On Unix systems,
there are almost always many ways to do pretty much the same thing.
There are many ways to write to a file, read from a file, and empty a
file, though named pipes have a certain efficiency going for them.For one thing, named pipe content resides in memory rather than being
written to disk. It is passed only when both ends of the pipe have
been opened. And you can write to a pipe multiple times before it is
opened at the other end and read.