See
https://gist.github.com/3751746 for details.
Basically, in Node 0.6, if you start a child_process with
child_process.spawn, the pipe2 system call was used to create the
pipes between parent and child.
This was changed (I believe) in this commit by indutny:
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/c0081f0e6675131721dbb5138fd398792a8c2163
Now the socketpair call is used to create those fds.
I'm not sure why that choice was made, but it has at least one bad
effect: it breaks the ability to use "/dev/stdin" or "/proc/self/fd/0"
on the child, at least on Linux.
The gist shows a Node program that basically just spawns "cat
/proc/self/fd/0", closes the pipe to the cat, and shows what the cat
outputs. In 0.6.17 cat happily cats the empty stdin and exits 1. In
0.8.8 cat fails to open the /proc/self/fd/0.
The C program in the gist shows that the difference really is just
socketpair vs pipe2. If you run the version with pipe2 the open call
succeeds. Comment out pipe2 and uncomment socketpair, and the open
call fails.
Was this behavior change intentional?
What benefits are created by switching from pipe2 to socketpair?
--dave