A
pipe is a channel of communication between two processes. A process with a handle to
one end can communicate with another process that has a handle to the other end.
This means that you can use a specialized Windows application to provide information
to your SAS session or vice versa.
Pipes can be one-way or two-way tests. With a one-way pipe, one application can write
data only to the pipe while the other application reads
from it. With a two-way pipe, both applications can read and write data. There are
two types of pipes:
handles one way communication. Also called an anonymous pipe (or simply pipe), it
is typically used to communicate between a parent process and
a child process. Within SAS, SAS is the parent process that invokes (and reads data
from) a child process.
handles one-way or two-way communication between two unrelated processes. That is,
one process is not started by the other. In fact, it is possible to have two applications
communicating over a pipe on a
network. You can use named pipes within SAS to communicate with other applications or even
with another SAS session.