Re: Portability of mknod

[Gavin Smith]

On 27 November 2016 at 06:40, Daniel E. Macks <address@hidden> wrote:
> A bunch of info/t tests in texinfo-6.3 were SKIPped on my OS X 10.11
> box, all as a result of 'mknod' being detected but then failing in
> Init-inter.inc. I do have /sbin/mknod, but it's not GNUish. In
> particular, it doesn't support the "p" token to cause creation of a
> named FIFO pipe. If I install GNU coreutils, I do get a mknod that
> behaves the way the tests want, and the tests succeed. But darwin does
> have 'mkfifo', and if I use that instead of mknod, the tests also
> succeed.
>
> It's not as simple as setting an autoconf variable whose value could
> be "mknod" or "mkfifo", because mkfifo implicitly knows to create
> named pipes (no token to pass). That is, GNU wants:
>
>   mknod FOO p
>
> but darwin needs:
>
>   mkfifo FOO

I wonder if we should just use "mkfifo" instead, and skip the test if
it isn't found. "mkfifo" appears to be in POSIX
(http://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1posix/mkfifo/), whereas I could
find no mention of a "mknod" command in POSIX.