Create a temporary FIFO (named pipe) in Python?

Question

How can you create a temporary FIFO (named pipe) in Python? This should work:

import tempfile

temp_file_name = mktemp()
os.mkfifo(temp_file_name)
open(temp_         


        

Answer 1

Effectively, all that mkstemp does is run mktemp in a loop and keeps attempting to exclusively create until it succeeds (see stdlib source code here). You can do the same with os.mkfifo:

import os, errno, tempfile

def mkftemp(*args, **kwargs):
    for attempt in xrange(1024):
        tpath = tempfile.mktemp(*args, **kwargs)

        try:
            os.mkfifo(tpath, 0600)
        except OSError as e:
            if e.errno == errno.EEXIST:
                # lets try again
                continue
            else:
                raise
        else:
           # NOTE: we only return the path because opening with
           # os.open here would block indefinitely since there 
           # isn't anyone on the other end of the fifo.
           return tpath
    else:
        raise IOError(errno.EEXIST, "No usable temporary file name found")