6.3.4 Blocking Actions on a FIFO

Normally, blocking occurs on a FIFO. In other words, if the FIFO is opened for reading, the process will "block" until some other process opens it for writing. This action works vice-versa as well. If this behavior is undesirable, the O_NONBLOCK flag can be used in an open() call to disable the default blocking action.

In the case with our simple server, we just shoved it into the background, and let it do its blocking there. The alternative would be to jump to another virtual console and run the client end, switching back and forth to see the resulting action.