pipe

1. operating system One of Unix's buffers which can be

written to by one asynchronous process and read by another,

with the kernel suspending and waking up the sender and

receiver according to how full the pipe is. In later versions

of Unix, rather than using an anonymous kernel-managed

temporary file to implement a pipe, it can be named and is

implemented as a local socket pair.

2. character "|" ASCII character 124. Used to represent a

pipe between two processes in a shell command line. E.g.

grep foo log | more

which feeds the output of grep into the input of more without

requiring a named temporary file and without waiting for the

first process to finish.

3. jargon, networking A connection to a network.

See also light pipe.

(1996-09-24)