Are you talking about named pipes or sockets? Your description doesn't match what standard pipe is able to do. An ordinary pipe requires some ancestral process to set the thing up.

Normally, a fifo blocks on open until the other end is opened as well. An alarm timeout or a non-blocking sysopen polling in a sleepy loop can be used to detect the hang.

Similarly, if you are talking about sockets, a timeout can be used to detect a lack of listeners.