This question is meant to be language and connection method independent. Actually finding methods is the question.
I know that I can directly pipe two processes through a call like prog1 | prog2 in the shell, and I’ve read something about RPC and Sockets. But everything was a little too abstract to really get a grip on it. For example it’s not clear to me, how the sockets are created and if each process needs to create a socket or if many processes can use the same socket to transfer messages to each other or if I can get rid of the sockets completely.
Can someone explain how Interprocess-Communication in Linux really works and what options I have?
Pipe
In a producer-consumer scenario, you can use pipes, it’s an IPC. A pipe is just what the name suggest, it connects a sink and a source together. In he shell the source is the standard output and the sink the standard input, so cmd1 | cmd2 just connects the output of cmd1 to the input of cmd2.
Using a pipe, it creates you two file descriptors. You can use one for the sink and the other one for the source. Once the pipe is created, you fork and one process uses one oof the file descriptor while the other one uses the other.
Other IPC
IPCs are various: pipe (in memory), named pipe (through a file), socket, shared memory, semaphore, message queue, signals, etc. All have pro’s and con’s. There are a lot of litterature online and in books about them. Describing them all here would be difficult.
Basically you have to understand that each process has it’s own memory, separated from other processes. So you need to find shared resources through which to exchange data. A resource can be “physical” like a network (for socket) or mass storage (for files) or “abstract” like a pipe or a signal.