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Integration with I/O

Another issue is whether the IPC primitives are integated with file and terminal I/O. The integration would make the OS API become smaller, hence easier to understand and learn, and also allow late binding of a source or destination of information. On the other hand, it would not allow functionality specific to message passing such as send this message urgently. Unix sockets, which we will see in some detail later, resolve this problem by allowing traditional I/O routines such as read and write to be also used for message passing and providing additional special routines such as send and recv to handle message-specific communication.



Prasun Dewan 2006-02-02