Parent and Child process communicate in unix

A child and parent can interact through any of the normal inter-process communication schemes (pipes, message queues, sockets, shared memory), but also have some special paths to interact that take advantage of their relationship as a child and parent. 

One of the most general is that the parent may act the exit status of the child.  Since the child adds file descriptors from its parent, the parent may start both ends of a fork, pipe, then the parent close one part and the child close the other part of the pipe. This is what occurs when you call the popen() routine to execute another program from within yours, i.e. you may write to the file descriptor given from popen() and the child process looks it as its stdin, or you may read from the file descriptor and look what the program wrote to its stdout.