A capability
supported by some
operating systems that allows one
process to communicate with another
process. The processes can be
running on the same
computer or on different computers connected through a
network.
IPC enables one application to control another application, and for several applications to share the same data without interfering with one another. IPC is required in all multiprocessing systems, but it is not generally supported by single-process operating systems such as DOS. OS/2 and MS-Windows support an IPC mechanism called DDE .