xpipe

xpipe^[1]

Use cross-platform IPC^[2] paths in node.

Background

In node - instead of utilizing TCP - you can use IPC to communicate to other services like...

• web servers (NGINX)
• data structure stores (redis)
• databases (MongoDB, Cassandra)
• [place your own here :]

...or to interconnect node applications, Electron frontends/backends etc.

This can lead to large speed gains.

On unixoid operating systems - e.g. Linux and OS X - we use Unix domain sockets that are referred by file descriptors.
Unlike the former, Windows utilizes named pipes living in the root directory of the NPFS^[3], mounted under the special path \\.\pipe\.

To mitigate these differences and to to support writing better cross-platform code, xpipe was born...

Usage

const xpipe = require('xpipe');

let prefix = xpipe.prefix;
console.log( `prefix:  ${prefix}` );
/*
  [empty string] on Linux and OS X
  "//./pipe/" on Windows
*/

let ipcPath = xpipe.eq('/tmp/my.sock');
console.log( `ipcPath: ${ipcPath}` );
/*
  "/tmp/my.sock" on Linux and OS X
  "//./pipe/tmp/my.sock" on Windows
*/

When did Windows start accepting forward slash as a path separator?

Every Windows API/kernel ever has accepted "/" as a path separator. So has every version of MS-DOS beginning with DOS 2.0 (the first version to support subdirectories).

It's only been in command lines that "/" was not allowed when it had already been used as a switch delimiter in MS-DOS 1.0 (introduced by IBM).

This behaviour could be bypassed (at least on modern Windows systems) by including the path in double quotation marks:

• cd c:/Windows and cd /Windows work^[4]
• dir ./ /B fails but dir "./" /B works

Further articles:

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)

 

 

[1]: xpipe stands for xp (cross-platform) IPC path equalizer
[2]: inter-process communication, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication
[3]: named pipe file system (in-memory)
[4]: on Windows "/" without a leading drive letter represents the root of the current drive