how big is a pipe?

[BostonU SysMgr]

>From: rbp at investor.UUCP (Bob Peirce)
>How big is the pipe?  I read somewhere pipes use the root file system,
>which on our computer has about 1100 free blocks.  Yet, I have used
>cphier to transfer, for example, the entire netnews source, including
>rn, from one drive to another.  All I created was the highest level
>directory.  Cphier made all the rest.  Will it sometimes work and sometimes
>fail on a transfer of this size?

If the 'producer' gets too far ahead of the 'consumer' the 'producer'
will be blocked at it's next attempt to write to the pipe until the
'consumer' catches up some. The answer is no, it should not fail in the
way you fear, of course, Murphy has proven that it will find a different
way to fail :-)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University