int pipe(int fd[2])

After the pipe has been established, cooperating processes created by subsequent fork(2) calls may pass data through the pipe with read and write calls. The bytes placed on a pipe by one write are contiguous even if many processes are writing. Write boundaries are preserved: each read terminates when the read buffer is full or after reading the last byte of a write, whichever comes first.

The number of bytes available to a read(2) is reported in the Length field returned by fstat or dirfstat on a pipe (see stat(2)).

When all the data has been read from a pipe and the writer has closed the pipe or exited, read(2) will return 0 bytes. Writes to a pipe with no reader will generate a note sys: write on closed pipe.