Prevent stdin wait for first message from named pipe

Question

I need to communicate with a background process via a named pipe. This background process is a node.js process.

So I do this in a shell script:

mkfifo MYPIPE
node script.js < MYPIPE

what happens is that the node.js script does not start - it appears to be waiting for the first stdin message to be written to MYPIPE.

What I want to do, is send the data from MYPIPE to the stdin of the node process, but I want to start the node.js process instead of it waiting for the first message from MYPIPE. How do I do that?

Answer 1

this was just a simple case of doing this instead:

cat MYPIPE | node script.js

I guess I just don't understand why that behaves differently than

node script.js < MYPIPE