Determine the size of a pipe without calling read()

Question

I need a function called SizeOfPipe() which should return the size of a pipe - I only want to know how much data is in the pipe and not actually read data off t

Answer 1

I do not think it's possible. Pipes present stream-oriented protocol rather than packet-oriented one. IOW, if you write to a pipe twice, once with,say, 250 bytes and once with, say, 520 bytes, there is no way to tell how many bytes you'll get from the other end in one read request. You could get 256, 256, and then the rest.

If you need to impose packets on a pipe, you need to do it yourself by writing pre-determined (or delimited) number of bytes as packet length, and then the rest of teh packet. Use select() to find out if there is data to read, use read() to get a reasonably-sized buffer. When you have your buffer, it's your responsibility to determine the packet boundary.