How to make a pipe loop in bash

Question

Assume that I have programs P0, P1, ...P(n-1) for some n > 0. How can I easily redirect the output of program Pi

Answer 1

This is a very interesting question. I (vaguely) remember an assignment very similar in college 17 years ago. We had to create an array of pipes, where our code would get filehandles for the input/output of each pipe. Then the code would fork and close the unused filehandles.

I'm thinking you could do something similar with named pipes in bash. Use mknod or mkfifo to create a set of pipes with unique names you can reference then fork your program.