egm and hpl

i got this notion i could set up egm to unload to a pipe and have hpl grab it. so... i have a qry which works like this: unload to company.dmxs select *,company_name from dmxs@dmxsegm:"MFIDMX".company where USER_CLASS_KEY=45 which unloads just fine to the file 'company.dmxs'. ( it connects to an oracle db on a remote server) then (having run as root %mknod mypipe_file p and chmod 777 the file ) and then when i run this: output to pipe cat | mypipe_file select *,company_name from dmxs@dmxsegm:"MFIDMX".company where USER_CLASS_KEY=45 i get error 813: cannot write to pipe for output (no reading process) any ideas on how can i write to the pipe? and then this funny thing.. i set up the xterm(!) from my nt at home, get hpl running on it ( hpl on the remote hp box) and when am in the screen for create a load map i choose from the drop down list of databases, but when i get to picking a table i get an error in the Message box: "Invalid Database Selection!" on some of the databases i do not get this error. at first i thought it was the length of the database name 'test_samag' got the error, but also 'samag' got the error. i do not think its a permission error. anybody - any ideas on that one?