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# 6.1 Introduction

The Linux IPC (Inter-process communication) facilities provide a method for multiple processes to communicate with one another. There are several methods of IPC available to Linux C programmers:

- Half-duplex UNIX pipes
- FIFOs (named pipes)
- SYSV style message queues
- SYSV style semaphore sets
- SYSV style shared memory segments
- Networking sockets (Berkeley style) (not covered in this paper)
- Full-duplex pipes (STREAMS pipes) (not covered in this paper)

These facilities, when used effectively, provide a solid framework for client/server development on any UNIX system (including Linux).