Windows System Programming, Fourth Edition

Chapter 11. Interprocess Communication

Chapter 6 showed how to create and manage processes, and Chapters 7 to 10 showed how to manage and synchronize threads within processes. So far, however, we have not been able to perform direct process-to-process communication other than through shared memory (Chapter 5).

The next step is to provide sequential interprocess communication (IPC) between processes¹ using filelike objects. Two primary Windows mechanisms for IPC are the anonymous pipe and the named pipe, both of which are accessed with the familiar ReadFile and WriteFile functions. Simple anonymous pipes are character-based and half-duplex. As such, they are well suited for redirecting the output of one program to the input of another, as is ...