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

Honestly there is very little reason to not use it. -pipe will only use a tad more ram, which if this box is building code, I'd assume has a decent amount. It can significantly improve build time if your system is using a more conservative filesystem that writes and then deletes all the temporary files along the way (ext3, for example.)