pipes.rs: minor cleanup & prepare caching fcntl

[oech3]

This PR depends on #12359 . Don't review this before it.

[github-actions]

GNU testsuite comparison:

Skip an intermittent issue tests/pr/bounded-memory (fails in this run but passes in the 'main' branch)
Skipping an intermittent issue tests/tail/retry (passes in this run but fails in the 'main' branch)
Note: The gnu test tests/basenc/bounded-memory is now being skipped but was previously passing.

[codspeed-hq]

Merging this PR will not alter performance

✅ 319 untouched benchmarks
⏩ 46 skipped benchmarks¹

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_{Comparing oech3:splice-res (e185574) with main (2a8ce67)²}

Footnotes

1. 46 benchmarks were skipped, so the baseline results were used instead. If they were deleted from the codebase, click here and archive them to remove them from the performance reports. ↩

2. No successful run was found on main (af3e2cf) during the generation of this report, so 2a8ce67 was used instead as the comparison base. There might be some changes unrelated to this pull request in this report. ↩