&gt; For example, when they are composed by multiple parts and give the filename for further processing via IPC<p>Of course, the proper way to do this in POSIX is to pass the filehandle.<p>POSIX is actually a pretty cool standard; the sad thing is that one doesn&#x27;t often see good examples of its capabilities being used to their full extent.<p>For this, I primarily blame C: it&#x27;s so verbose and has such limited facilities for abstraction that it&#x27;s often difficult to see the forest for the trees.  Combine that with a generation of folks whose knowledge of C dates back to a college course or four, in which efficient POSIX usage may not have been a concern, and one finds good, easy-to-read examples of POSIX harder to find than they really should be.