Pipes and FIFOs

Pipes form a basic unidirectional, self-synchronous means of communication between processes. As the name suggests, they have two ends: one where a process writes and the opposite end from where another process reads the data. Presumably what goes in first will be read out first in this kind of a setup. Pipes innately result in communication synchronization due to their limited capacity: if the writing process writes much faster than the reading process reads, the pipe’s capacity will fail to hold excess data and invariably block the writing process until the reader reads and frees up data. Similarly, if the reader reads data faster than the writer, it will be left with no data to read, thus being blocked until data becomes available.

Pipes can be used as a messaging resource for both cases of communication: between related processes and between unrelated processes. When applied between related processes, pipes are referred to as unnamed pipes, since they are not enumerated...