Question

Which of the following system call is used for inter-process communication?

(a) fork

(b) pipe

(c) fcntl

(d) exec

I got this question in a national level competition.

This interesting question is from Process Control System Calls in chapter System Programming II – Process Control & Unix System Performance of Unix

Answer 1

Right answer is (b) pipe

The best explanation: UNIX has a very elaborative scheme for two processes to communicate with each other. Pipe is a system call which provides a half-duplex communication channel. Pipe takes an array of two integers as its only argument, which it populates with two file descriptors.