Communicating with a pipe
In this recipe, we'll create a program that forks and then communicates between two processes using a pipe. Sometimes, when we fork a process, the parent and the child need a way to communicate. A pipe is often a simple way to do just that.
Knowing how to communicate and interchange data between a parent and a child process is important when you're writing more complex programs.
Getting ready
For this recipe, we'll only need the GCC compiler, the Make tool, and the generic Makefile.
How to do it…
Let's write a simple program that forks:
- Write the following code in a file and name it
pipe-example.c. We'll go through the code step by step. Remember that all the code goes in the same file.
We'll start with the include lines and the main() function. Then, we'll create an integer array of size 2. The pipe will use that array later. The first integer in the array (0) is the file descriptor for...