The GNU C Library
15.4 Atomicity of Pipe I/O
Reading or writing pipe data is atomic if the size of data written
is not greater than PIPE_BUF. This means that the data transfer
seems to be an instantaneous unit, in that nothing else in the system
can observe a state in which it is partially complete. Atomic I/O may
not begin right away (it may need to wait for buffer space or for data),
but once it does begin it finishes immediately.
Reading or writing a larger amount of data may not be atomic; for
example, output data from other processes sharing the descriptor may be
interspersed. Also, once PIPE_BUF characters have been written,
further writes will block until some characters are read.
See section 31.6 Limits on File System Capacity, for information about the PIPE_BUF
parameter.
