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. 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.