As long as the writes are less than 4k, usually, the operation is atomic. This allows multiple processes to use the same pipe - /var/log/splunk for example.
But this is a "I don't want to write to a file" type scenario.
The only other use that I can think if is letting Splunk observe communications between processes that use named pipes, and act on it, like logging xmlrpc calls.
I can't think of downsides - reads are blocking, you can't seek, the data can get lost if not cached on disk before it's read from the pipe. ACLs are limited to what the file system provides, but all those are only a limit if the pipes were to pretend to be files.
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