Both can be used for communicating between different processes,
what’s the difference?
Both can be used for communicating between different processes, what’s the difference?
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Both can be used for communicating between different processes,
what’s the difference?
Windows has two kinds of pipes: anonymous pipes and named pipes. Anonymous pipes correspond (fairly) closely to Unix pipes — typical usage is for a parent process to set them up to be inherited by a child process, often connected to the standard input, output and/or error streams of the child. At one time, anonymous pipes were implemented completely differently from named pipes so they didn’t (for one example) support overlapped I/O. Since then, that’s changed so an anonymous pipe is basically just a named pipe with a name you don’t know, so you can’t open it by name, but it still has all the other features of a named pipe (such as the aforementioned overlapped I/O capability).
Windows named pipes are much more like sockets. They originated with OS/2, where they were originally the primary mechanism for creating client/server applications. They were originally built around NetBIOS (i.e., used NetBIOS both for addressing and transport). They’re tightly integrated with things like Windows authentication, so you can (for example) have a named pipe server impersonate the client to restrict the server to doing things the client would be able to do if logged in directly. More recently, MS has gone to some trouble to get rid of the dependence on NetBIOS, but even though they can now use IP as their transport (and DNS for addressing, IIRC) they’re still used primarily for Windows machines. The primary use on other machines is to imitate Windows, such as by running Samba.