This is documented behaviour.  You can't open a FIFO in read mode
until a writer has opened the FIFO - instead the open(2) syscall will
block.  You can pass the O_NONBLOCK flag to open, in which case the
open call will not block.  Or you can open for read and write (because
you yourself are then supplying a writer).

Some more details here:

http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/Linux/man4/fifo.4.html

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com