Create a temporary FIFO (named pipe) in Python?

by

os.mkfifo() will fail with exception OSError: [Errno 17] File exists if the file already exists, so there is no security issue here. The security issue with using tempfile.mktemp() is the race condition where it is possible for an attacker to create a file with the same name before you open it yourself, but since os.mkfifo() fails if the file already exists this is not a problem.

However, since mktemp() is deprecated you shouldn’t use it. You can use tempfile.mkdtemp() instead:

import os, tempfile

tmpdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
filename = os.path.join(tmpdir, 'myfifo')
print filename
try:
    os.mkfifo(filename)
except OSError, e:
    print "Failed to create FIFO: %s" % e
else:
    fifo = open(filename, 'w')
    # write stuff to fifo
    print >> fifo, "hello"
    fifo.close()
    os.remove(filename)
    os.rmdir(tmpdir)

EDIT: I should make it clear that, just because the mktemp() vulnerability is averted by this, there are still the other usual security issues that need to be considered; e.g. an attacker could create the fifo (if they had suitable permissions) before your program did which could cause your program to crash if errors/exceptions are not properly handled.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I create a python code that distinguishes between the capital of a state and the state that the capital has?
  2. How to name a file using a value in a list in a dictionary?
  3. How to copy files?
  4. Search and replace a line in a file in Python
  5. How do I get file creation and modification date/times?
  6. How to search and replace text in a file?
  7. What are the risks of running ‘sudo pip’?
  8. Basic http file downloading and saving to disk in python?
  9. What is the best way to open a file for exclusive access in Python?
  10. Compare two different files line by line in python
  11. Read from file after write, before closing
  12. Change to sudo user within a python script
  13. TypeError: expected a character buffer object – while trying to save integer to textfile
  14. python – Read file from and to specific lines of text
  15. How do I change the file creation date of a Windows file?
  16. Re-read an open file Python
  17. Fastest way to process a large file?
  18. How do I re.search or re.match on a whole file without reading it all into memory?
  19. Get Line Number of certain phrase in file Python
  20. Fastest way to write huge data in file
  21. Reading integers from binary file in Python
  22. Who originally invented this type of syntax: -*- coding: utf-8 -*- [duplicate]
  23. Google Authenticator implementation in Python
  24. create file of particular size in python
  25. Do files get closed during an exception exit?
  26. pickle – putting more than 1 object in a file? [duplicate]
  27. Read random lines from huge CSV file
  28. What is the difference between .py and .pyc files? [duplicate]
  29. See if two files have the same content in python [duplicate]
  30. how to count the total number of lines in a text file using python

Leave a Comment