Yesterday, we were having problems with one of applications not displaying images. After further examination (reading the console output), it was determined that a named pipe file was missing. A named pipe allows two unrelated processes to communicate with each other. Here's what was done to recreate this special FIFO file.
This action creates a named pipe called mypipe.
# mknod mypipe p
In our case, the named pipe needed to be read and writable by everyone
# chmod 666 mypipe
An alternate way of creating the named pipe - suggested by ux-admin:
# mkfifo mypipe
# chmod 666 mypipe