Message queue

[Ammar_4]

What is message queue?

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

Answer is : it depends

Message queue may refer to a mail messages queue located under /var/spool/mqueue in some terminolgy, but more than likely what you are looking for is not this meaning.

Message queue is an intermediary step between two or more processes, in which, a process leaves a message indicating completion of a task or request for data or that sort of thing, whereas other processes can read from this queue and take over some tasks.

It is some sort of a middleware for the lack of a better term.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

In UNIX, message queues refer to one of the three Inter-Process Communication System (IPCS) mechanisms. The other two are semaphores and shared memory. The idea is that a message queue is an ordered set of data that can be sent from one process to another and each message can also have a priority so that more important messages can be read out of sequence. Man msgget, msgop, and msgctl for details.