Nginx not starting with named pipe (fifo) for access_log

[Sven Wiese]

Heya,

there seems to be a issue with Nginx and named pipes (fifo).

Tested nginx versions:
- 1.1.19 (Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS amd64)
- 1.4.4 (Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS amd64 with PPA 
https://launchpad.net/~nginx/+archive/stable )
- 1.4.4 (CentOS 6.5 amd64 with repo 
http://nginx.org/packages/centos/$releasever/$basearch/ )

Issue description:
As soon as a named pipe is defined as access_log, nginx refuses to 
start. It just stales during the start and that's it. The only you can 
do is kill the process.
The named pipe has been created with: mkfifo -m 0666 /var/log/test.log

I have tested 2 versions of Nginx (1.1.19, 1.4.4) using Ubuntus 
repository. Different locations and different permissions of the named 
pipe have been tried, didn't help.
Other programs work just fine with the named pipe, only Nginx seems to 
refuse it.

Configuration:
--snip--
http {
[...]
         access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
         error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
         access_log /var/log/test.log;
[...]
}
--snap--

strace output:
--snip--
[...]
open("/var/log/nginx/access.log", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND, 0644) = 5
fcntl(5, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)           = 0
open("/var/log/nginx/error.log", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND, 0644) = 6
fcntl(6, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)           = 0
open("/var/log/test.log", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND, 0644
[ CTRL+C ]
--snap--


Did anyone else experience such behavior? I tried searching for it but 
couldn't find anything, only people seeming to successfully use named 
pipes (eg. in conjunction with syslog-ng).

Cheers,
Sven



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