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6.1 Introduction

The Linux IPC (Inter-process communication) facilities provide a method for multiple processes to communicate with one another. There are several methods of IPC available to Linux C programmers:

Half-duplex UNIX pipes
FIFOs (named pipes)
SYSV style message queues
SYSV style semaphore sets
SYSV style shared memory segments
Networking sockets (Berkeley style) (not covered in this paper)
Full-duplex pipes (STREAMS pipes) (not covered in this paper)

These facilities, when used effectively, provide a solid framework for client/server development on any UNIX system (including Linux).

Converted on:
Fri Mar 29 14:43:04 EST 1996