IPC using Linux pipe

Question

I have doubt in using Linux Pipes for IPC. My question is

Can Linux pipes can be used to communicate between the processes running on different machines?.

Thanks,

• osgx: You can also check the slides man7.org/conf/lca2013/IPC_Overview-LCA-2013-printable.pdf about different IPC's in Linux.

Answer 1

No, you can't use only pipe to communicate between different machines, because pipe is defined as local machine communication method (IEEE standard says that it creates two file descriptors in current process. Descriptors usually can't be send to other machine, only inherited from parent or passed via local machine sockets).

But you can try to use pipe to some external socket program, like netcat, which will resend all data over tcp socket, and remote netcat will replay it back into the program.

And if you are developing some application, it can be better to use tcp sockets directly.

PS: The IPC - Inter-process communication - AFAIK means communications between different processes on one (same) machine (linux IPC from Linux Programmer's Guide 1995).

PPS: If sockets are hard to work with them directly, you may choose some Message Passing library or standard. For example MPI standard (OpenMPI, MPICH libraries) is often used to communicate between many machines in tightly-coupled computing clusters, and there are some popular interfaces like RPC (Remote procedure call, several implementations) or ZeroMQ

Answer 2

Pipe is only used for communication between related process on the same host (eg. parent and child process).