Nonblocking/asynchronous fifo/named pipe in shell/filesystem?

Question

Is there a way to create non blocking/asynchronous named pipe or something similar in shell? So that programs could place lines in it, those lines would stay in ram, and when some program could read some lines from pipe, while leaving what it did not read in fifo? It is also very probable that programs can be writing and reading to this fifo at the same time. At first I though maybe this could be done using files, but after searching a web for a bit it seems nothing good can come from the fact that file is read and written at same time. Named pipes would almost work, just there are two problems: first they block reads/writes if there is no one at the other end, second even if I let writing to blocked and set two processes to write to pipe while no one is reading, by trying to write one line with each process, and then try head -n 1 <fifo> I get just one line as I need, but both writing processes terminate, and second line is lost. Any suggestions?

Edit: maybe some intermediate program could be used to help with this, acting like mediator between writers and readers?

Answer 1

You can use special program for this purpose - buffer. Buffer is designed to try and keep the writer side continuously busy so that it can stream when writing to tape drives, but you can use for other purposes. Internally buffer is a pair of processes communicating via a large circular queue held in shared memory, so your processes will work asynchronously. Your reader process will be blocked in case the queue is full and the writer process - in case the queue is empty. Example:

bzcat archive.bz2 | buffer -m 16000000 -b 100000 | processing_script | bzip2 > archive_processed.bz2

http://linux.die.net/man/1/buffer