VDict mobile



1. operating system One of Unix's buffers which can be
written to by one asynchronous process and read by another,
with the kernel suspending and waking up the sender and
receiver according to how full the pipe is. In later versions
of Unix, rather than using an anonymous kernel-managed
temporary file to implement a pipe, it can be named and is
implemented as a local socket pair.
2. character "|" ASCII character 124. Used to represent a
pipe between two processes in a shell command line. E.g.
grep foo log | more
which feeds the output of grep into the input of more without
requiring a named temporary file and without waiting for the
first process to finish.
3. jargon, networking A connection to a network.
See also light pipe.
(1996-09-24)