I think you misunderstood what they're asking. They're trying to open a named pipe, which is a special pipe which lives in the filesystem. When you try and open it the open(2) system call underneath will block if there's no writer on the other end.
They need to look at the O_NONBLOCK flag for sysopen rather than using open.
Update: Excepting of course that that will just make the sysopen fail with a return code of EAGAIN (I believe). That's just the way named pipes work; the call blocks until there's something on the other end.
In reply to Re^2: open ($FH,"<named pipe") blocking
by Fletch
in thread open ($FH,"<named pipe") blocking
by gnu@perl
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