mkfifo(1)

mkfifo1

Make fifos

Usage

mkfifo [-m mode] fifo_name ...

Overview

mkfifo creates the FIFOs requested, in the order specified, using mode 0666 modified by the current umask(2). It requires write permission in the parent directory.

The options are as follows:

-m mode

Set the file permission bits of newly created FIFOs to mode. The mode argument can be in any of the formats specified to the chmod(1) utility. If a symbolic mode is specified, the operators ‘+’ and ‘-’ are interpreted relative to an initial mode of “a=rw”.

Exit status

The mkfifo utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

Releases

61 releases since OpenBSD 2.1; the text changed 10 times.

  1. 2.1–2.3
  2. 2.4–2.5
  3. 2.6
  4. 2.7–3.3
  5. 3.4–4.0
  6. 4.1
  7. 4.2–4.3
  8. 4.4
  9. 4.5–4.8
  10. 4.9–7.1
  11. 7.2–8.0

Standards

The mkfifo utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”) specification.

History

The mkfifo command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.