Working with pipes for local IPC

Pipes originally came from Unix but have also found their way to other platforms. A pipe is like a direct connection between two systems. It is very lightweight and easy to set up. You can use them to communicate between processes on the same machine and between machines across a network. Theoretically, you can communicate between Linux and Windows using pipes. I said theoretically because since the implementation of the pipes on both platforms is so different, you have to jump through many loops to get that working. In fact, the work you must do to get it working is so intensive that you might as well use other ways, such as sockets, to achieve that same result. That will be much easier to pull off.

There are two types of pipes: named pipe and anonymous pipe. The named pipe is the simplest of them.

Named pipes

Named pipes are a great solution if you want to communicate from one process to another on the same machine. Communicating over a network...