44PIPES 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 (the meaning of related will become clear later). FIFOs are a variation on the pipe concept. The important difference is that FIFOs can be used for communication between any processes.
44.1 Overview
Every user of the shell is familiar with the use of pipes in commands such as the following, ...
Get The Linux Programming Interface now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
