Windows NT must provide all the same mechanisms Windows 3.1 and its predecessors did, and must supply the mechanisms that other operating systems provide. So it's no surprise that the mechanisms UNIX supplies are implemented in Windows NT in one way or another. UNIX IPC Mechanisms Most of you already know which IPC mechanisms are available in HP-UX, but I'd like to review the main ones just to refresh your memory. I make a distinction between process synchronization and inter-process communication, so I'm not going to include signals or semaphores as IPC mechanisms. They communicate only a single value at best and are therefore synchronization mechanisms.
Pipes read or write bytes to a virtual file in memory.
Anonymous pipes are pipes that don't have a name, and so may be used only between parent and child or child and child-related programs. A pipe name is like a file name. This allows any program in the system to obtain the name from the kernel and use the pipe. Named pipes are used more often than anonymous pipes because they allow two unrelated programs to communicate. Messages are small packets of data that are placed in a queue.