Chapter 20

Intertask Communication

Pipe

Abstract

Similarly to message queues, pipes offer another mechanism for intertask communication. An unnamed pipe is typically used between processes that are related by either a parent-child relationship or a sibling relationship. A named pipe is a persistent file object, which is typically used between processes that are not necessarily related. Each pipe has two ends, one for writing and one for reading. The read operation on a pipe can be blocked if the pipe is empty, and the write operation on a pipe can be blocked if the available space is not sufficient to hold the data to be written. In a POSIX-compliant operating system implementation, the write operation on a pipe is atomic when the data to ...

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