Not really what I wanted to hear, but you're right - it would work :-/ The advantage of using a fifo is that as lines are read from the fifo, they are deleted - so the disadvantage of using a real file on disk to write to and read from is the *reader* having to delete lines it's read, or keeping a pointer in the file of last line read or something.

Michael, the project I'm working on is logging for a cluster - 2 or more nodes in a cluster, each one writing cluster log entries to syslog. I'm really trying to figure out how to have all cluster nodes log to a central log. Using standard syslog, the only ways I've seen it described is by having the central log on a server node that is NOT a cluster node - separate from the cluster, like this:

   cluster node /etc/syslog.conf:

       local4.*        @my_logserver.my_company.com


    log server my_logserver.my_company.com machine
    /etc/syslog.conf:

       local4.*        |/var/log/cluster.log
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But I'm looking for a way that will not require a separate log server machine. Have you had experience with anything similar?