In article <slrnc26ead.s49.basile-news / hector.lesours>, Basile Starynkevitch
[news] wrote:
>Why is (the library call) mkfifo missing in Ruby 1.8? Is there a way
>to do it simply (without coding the trivial C stub) in Ruby, other
>than system("mkfifo #{path}")

You could use the 'dl' library:

require 'dl/import'

module LIBC
  extend DL::Importable

  dlload 'libc.so.6'

  extern 'int mkfifo(char*, uint)'
  extern 'void perror(char*)'
end

if -1 == LIBC.mkfifo('foo', 007)
    LIBC.perror("mkfifo")
end