I need to capture messages from postfix in order to do some analysis and so use a named pipe to interface between postfix and my analysis software in Java. I made a named pipe with mkfifo and edited /etc/syslog.conf to include the line:

mail.* |/var/log/named.pipe

and after saving of course I reloaded syslog.

However, this does not work. No messages ever get written to the named pipe. However if instead of a pipe I use a normal file then messages do get written to it. The really strange part is that I have an older machine which is configured the same way, and this does work there. Both machines use Fedora Core 4 and are very recently updated.

Does anyone have any idea of what may be going wrong? Been pulling hair out for two days.