>    On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Warren Toomey <[1]wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
>      Â  Â  Â  Â  close fd 0 and fd 1
>      Â  Â  Â  Â  dup() read end of pipe 1 to be stdin (fd 0)
>      Â  Â  Â  Â  dup() write end of pipe 2 to be stdout (fd 1)
>      Â  Â  Â  Â  exec("/bin/cat")

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 03:06:11PM +1000, Christopher Vance wrote:
>    Hi, Warren.
>    That still leaves a process, even if it is a relatively lean one.

Hi Chris! Very true.

>    Besides your fd 0 is presumably already the read end of the input pipe,
>    and fd 1 is already the write end of the output pipe. You could
>    probably reduce the whole thing to the last line.

Of course. If the shell set up the pipeline then we only have to exec("cat")
and leave /bin/cat shuffling the data from one pipe-end to the other.

As there are two distinct pipes, each with their own buffers, I can't see
a way of coalescing them into a single pipe without, as Chris suggests,
some kernelly goodness. Indeed, ugliness and complexity kernel-wise!

Cheers, Warren