Linux demos

pipes.c

What happens if you don't close the unused ends of a pipe, as pipe(2) and pipe(7) recommend? We can best test this by writing our own C code on both ends of the pipe. The GNU utilities are a little too robust to illustrate the behavior.

Following the man page, if we close this works:

make; ./pipes

Compare this to if we don't close the write end in the child (the consumer):

make; timeout 5 ./pipes --no-close-unused

pipes will now block forever (the timeout 5 will stop it after 5 seconds).