how best to handle multiple readers on a fifo?

Basically, I have a daemon process which I want to periodically check a fifo node made with mknod (STAT_FILE, S_IFIFO | 0444, 0) and spit up a status message.

Something like this:

        writefd = open (STAT_FILE, O_NDELAY | O_WRONLY);
        if (writefd > 0) {
                int len;
                len = give_ctrl_status (writefd);
                close (writefd);
        } else if (errno != ENXIO) {
                error ("Error (%s) reading " STAT_FILE, strerror (errno));
                all_done = 1;
        }

Yay. All's well until there's multiple processes consuming the message out of STAT_FILE.

The bash script below simulates the problem. If there's multiple readers, only one of them gets the message out of the fifo. This is not a Linux specific deal, Solaris does it too.

Here's the output of the script on Linux:
[mjfrazer@frogger fifo]$ ./fifo.test
after 1000 iterations:
winner[1] = 999
winner[2] = 1
winner[3] = 0
winner[4] = 0
[mjfrazer@frogger fifo]$ uname -a
Linux frogger 2.4.17 #1 Fri Jan 18 16:06:33 EST 2002 i686 unknown

and on Solaris:
[mjfrazer@toronto-fs fifo]$ ./fifo.test
after 100 iterations:
winner[1] = 19
winner[2] = 18
winner[3] = 16
winner[4] = 47
[mjfrazer@toronto-fs fifo]$ uname -a
SunOS toronto-fs 5.8 Generic_108528-10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4

As far as I can tell, I'm borked. What think the filesystem types of adding a flag to mknod or something to tell the pipe not to boot off unserviced readers?

-mark

#!/bin/bash

if [ uname = Linux ] ; then

        MAX=1000
        WAIT='usleep 100000'
elif [ `uname` = SunOS ] ; then
        MAX=100
        WAIT='sleep 1'

else
echo "Only runs on Solaris or Linux"
exit 1
fi

readers="1 2 3 4"

for i in $readers ; do

        winner[$i]=0

done

iter=0
while [ $iter -lt $MAX ] ; do
echo -ne " $(( $iter + 1 )) \r"

/bin/rm -f fifo
mkfifo fifo

trap "echo hello > fifo" INT

for i in $readers ; do
cat fifo > out.$i &
done
$WAIT

# ps -ef | grep 'cat fifo' | grep -v grep
echo hello > fifo

trap - INT

wait
ps -ef | grep 'cat fifo' | grep -v grep

for i in $readers ; do
if [ -s out.$i ] ; then
# echo winner is $i winner[$i]=$(( ${winner[$i]} + 1 )) ;
fi
done
iter=$(( $iter + 1 ))
done

echo "after $iter iterations:"
for i in $readers ; do

        echo winner\[$i] = ${winner[$i]}

done