Chapter 44: Pipes and FIFOs

This chapter describes pipes and FIFOs. Pipes are the oldest method of IPC on the Unix system, having appeared in Third Edition Unix in the early 1970s. Pipes provide an elegant solution to a frequent requirement: Having created two processes to run different programs (commands), how can the shell allow the output produced by one process to be used as the input to the other process? Pipes can be used to pass data between related processes. FIFOs are a variation on the pipe concept. The important difference is that FIFOs can be used for communication between any processes.

44 Pipes and FIFOs
44.1 Overview
44.2 Creating and Using Pipes
44.3 Pipes As a Method of Process Synchronization
44.4 Using Pipes to Connect Filters
44.5 Talking to a Shell Command via a Pipe: popen() and pclose()
44.6 Pipes and stdio Buffering
44.7 FIFOs
44.8 A Client-server Application Using FIFOs
44.9 Nonblocking I/O
44.10 Semantics of read() and write() on Pipes and FIFOs
44.11 Summary
44.12 Exercises