SAS Companion for the OS/2 Environment

Overview of Pipes

unnamed pipe: Also called an anonymous pipe (or simply pipe), this type of pipe is always one way. It is typically used to communicate between a parent process and a child process. Within SAS, the SAS System is the parent process that invokes (and reads data from) a child process.
named pipe: This type of pipe can handle 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.