I don't think named pipes work particuarly well in shell scripts. A program writing to a pipe will not terminate until the output is consumed. However, consuming the output will not happen until the program finishes and the script arrives that the program that reads from the pipe. Similarly, a program reading from the pipe will not terminate until the program writing to it does. If you start reading before you start writing, then you simply wait. Anonymous pipes solves this problem by launching all of the programs at the same time. You could work around this by telling the shell to run the command in the background (append & in bash).

Having said that, I have had occasion to use named pipes in a shell script. Basically, I had two programs and I wanted to determine which lines were in one, but not both, of their outputs. Using named pipes, I was able to do something like:

  mkfifo foo
  ./prog1 > foo &
  ./prog2 > foo &
  cat foo | sort | uniq -u

Effectively, this provides a way to combine the output of multiple commands. I took it as a matter of faith that doing this won't interleave lines. I assume that as long as both programs flush only at line breaks then there is not any problem.