Pipes

A pipe connects the output of one process to the input of another process. The pipe syscall takes an array that’s 2 elements wide. The first element fds[0] is the read end of the pipe, and the second element is the write end of the pipe fds[1]. Pipe returns a file descriptor, so it operates as other file descriptors do.

• pipe: forms a one-way communication channel using two file descriptors.
  • This takes a 2-sized integer array pipefd. pipefd[0] is the “read” end of the pipe, and pipefd[1] is the “write” end of the pipe.
  • This is effectively a buffer managed by the kernel.
  • We can take advantage of process forking to allow two processes to effectively communicate via the two ends.