| NAME | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | The Linux Programming Interface |
PIPE(7) Linux Programmer's Manual PIPE(7)
pipe - overview of pipes and FIFOs
Pipes and FIFOs (also known as named pipes) provide a unidirectional
interprocess communication channel. A pipe has a read end and a
write end. Data written to the write end of a pipe can be read from
the read end of the pipe.
A pipe is created using pipe(2), which creates a new pipe and returns
two file descriptors, one referring to the read end of the pipe, the
other referring to the write end. Pipes can be used to create a
communication channel between related processes; see pipe(2) for an
example.
A FIFO (short for First In First Out) has a name within the file
system (created using mkfifo(3)), and is opened using open(2). Any
process may open a FIFO, assuming the file permissions allow it. The
read end is opened using the O_RDONLY flag; the write end is opened
using the O_WRONLY flag. See fifo(7) for further details. Note:
although FIFOs have a pathname in the file system, I/O on FIFOs does
not involve operations on the underlying device (if there is one).
The only difference between pipes and FIFOs is the manner in which
they are created and opened. Once these tasks have been
accomplished, I/O on pipes and FIFOs has exactly the same semantics.
If a process attempts to read from an empty pipe, then read(2) will
block until data is available. If a process attempts to write to a
full pipe (see below), then write(2) blocks until sufficient data has
been read from the pipe to allow the write to complete. Nonblocking
I/O is possible by using the fcntl(2) F_SETFL operation to enable the
O_NONBLOCK open file status flag.
The communication channel provided by a pipe is a byte stream: there
is no concept of message boundaries.
If all file descriptors referring to the write end of a pipe have
been closed, then an attempt to read(2) from the pipe will see end-
of-file (read(2) will return 0). If all file descriptors referring
to the read end of a pipe have been closed, then a write(2) will
cause a SIGPIPE signal to be generated for the calling process. If
the calling process is ignoring this signal, then write(2) fails with
the error EPIPE. An application that uses pipe(2) and fork(2) should
use suitable close(2) calls to close unnecessary duplicate file
descriptors; this ensures that end-of-file and SIGPIPE/EPIPE are
delivered when appropriate.
It is not possible to apply lseek(2) to a pipe.
A pipe has a limited capacity. If the pipe is full, then a write(2)
will block or fail, depending on whether the O_NONBLOCK flag is set
(see below). Different implementations have different limits for the
pipe capacity. Applications should not rely on a particular
capacity: an application should be designed so that a reading process
consumes data as soon as it is available, so that a writing process
does not remain blocked.
In Linux versions before 2.6.11, the capacity of a pipe was the same
as the system page size (e.g., 4096 bytes on i386). Since Linux
2.6.11, the pipe capacity is 65536 bytes.
POSIX.1-2001 says that write(2)s of less than PIPE_BUF bytes must be
atomic: the output data is written to the pipe as a contiguous
sequence. Writes of more than PIPE_BUF bytes may be nonatomic: the
kernel may interleave the data with data written by other processes.
POSIX.1-2001 requires PIPE_BUF to be at least 512 bytes. (On Linux,
PIPE_BUF is 4096 bytes.) The precise semantics depend on whether the
file descriptor is nonblocking (O_NONBLOCK), whether there are
multiple writers to the pipe, and on n, the number of bytes to be
written:
O_NONBLOCK disabled, n <= PIPE_BUF
All n bytes are written atomically; write(2) may block if
there is not room for n bytes to be written immediately
O_NONBLOCK enabled, n <= PIPE_BUF
If there is room to write n bytes to the pipe, then write(2)
succeeds immediately, writing all n bytes; otherwise write(2)
fails, with errno set to EAGAIN.
O_NONBLOCK disabled, n > PIPE_BUF
The write is nonatomic: the data given to write(2) may be
interleaved with write(2)s by other process; the write(2)
blocks until n bytes have been written.
O_NONBLOCK enabled, n > PIPE_BUF
If the pipe is full, then write(2) fails, with errno set to
EAGAIN. Otherwise, from 1 to n bytes may be written (i.e., a
"partial write" may occur; the caller should check the return
value from write(2) to see how many bytes were actually
written), and these bytes may be interleaved with writes by
other processes.
The only open file status flags that can be meaningfully applied to a
pipe or FIFO are O_NONBLOCK and O_ASYNC.
Setting the O_ASYNC flag for the read end of a pipe causes a signal
(SIGIO by default) to be generated when new input becomes available
on the pipe (see fcntl(2) for details). On Linux, O_ASYNC is
supported for pipes and FIFOs only since kernel 2.6.
On some systems (but not Linux), pipes are bidirectional: data can be
transmitted in both directions between the pipe ends. According to
POSIX.1-2001, pipes only need to be unidirectional. Portable
applications should avoid reliance on bidirectional pipe semantics.
dup(2), fcntl(2), open(2), pipe(2), poll(2), select(2),
socketpair(2), stat(2), mkfifo(3), epoll(7), fifo(7)
This page is part of release 3.51 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2005-12-08 PIPE(7)
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