Module interprocess::unnamed_pipe

Creation and usage of unnamed pipes.

The primary distinction between named and unnamed pipes is rather trivial: named pipes have names in their special named pipe filesystem, while unnamed pipes only have handles. This can both be useful or problematic, depending on the use case. Unnamed pipes work best when communicating with child processes.

The handles and file descriptors are inheritable by default. The AsRawHandle and AsRawFd traits can be used to get a numeric handle value which can then be communicated to a child process using a command-line argument, environment variable or some other program startup IPC method. The numeric value can then be reconstructed into an I/O object using FromRawHandle/FromRawFd. Interprocess does not concern itself with how this is done.

Note the standard library’s support for piping stdin, stdout and stderr, which can be used in simple cases instead. Making use of that feature is advisable if the program of the child process can be modified to communicate with its parent via standard I/O streams.

Structs

• Recver
  Handle to the receiving end of an unnamed pipe, created by the pipe() function together with the sending end.
• Sender
  Handle to the sending end of an unnamed pipe, created by the pipe() function together with the receiving end.

Functions

• pipe
  Creates a new pipe with the default creation settings and returns the handles to its sending end and receiving end.