Create a temporary FIFO (named pipe) in Python?

Brian_M_Hunt_19212 0
Viewed 56697

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_file_name, os.O_WRONLY)
# ... some process, somewhere, will read it ...

However, I'm hesitant because of the big warning in Python Docs 11.6 and potential removal because it's deprecated.

EDIT: It's noteworthy that I've tried tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile (and by extension tempfile.mkstemp), but os.mkfifo throws:

OSError -17: File already exists

when you run it on the files that mkstemp/NamedTemporaryFile have created.

mkfifo fifo security file python
6 Answers

You may find it handy to use the following context manager, which creates and removes the temporary file for you:

import os
import tempfile
from contextlib import contextmanager


@contextmanager
def temp_fifo():
    """Context Manager for creating named pipes with temporary names."""
    tmpdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
    filename = os.path.join(tmpdir, 'fifo')  # Temporary filename
    os.mkfifo(filename)  # Create FIFO
    try:
        yield filename
    finally:
        os.unlink(filename)  # Remove file
        os.rmdir(tmpdir)  # Remove directory

You can use it, for example, like this:

with temp_fifo() as fifo_file:
    # Pass the fifo_file filename e.g. to some other process to read from.
    # Write something to the pipe 
    with open(fifo_file, 'w') as f:
        f.write("Hello\n")
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