Contents in a named pipe do not persist across OS restarts. Also a named pipe has limits about how much data you can put in it, because it's in-memory (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/fifo.7.html, http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/pipe.7.html) The persistent "pipes"mentioned in the post have none of these limitations (data persists as if it was in a regular file and the only limitations on size are the one imposed by the filesystem)