A communication conduit with two ends. A process with a handle to one end can communicate through a pipe with a process having a handle to the other end. Pipes can be one way (where one end is read only and the other end is write only) or two way (where both ends of the pipe can be used for reading or writing). The Win32 application programming interface (API) provides both anonymous (unnamed) pipes and named pipes. See also anonymous pipe, handle, named pipe, process.