When should I use GCC's -pipe option?

Question

The GCC 4.1.2 documentation has this to say about the -pipe option:

-pipe

Use pipes rather than temporary files for communica

Answer 1

In our experience with a medium-sized project, adding -pipe made no discernible difference in build times. We ran into a couple of problems with it (sometimes failing to delete intermediate files if an error was encountered, IIRC), and so since it wasn't gaining us anything, we quit using it rather than trying to troubleshoot those problems.