With pipes, the sender has to add a SIGPIPE handler which is not trivial to do if it's a library doing the send/recv. With sockets it can use send(fd, buf, MSG_

With pipes, the sender has to add a SIGPIPE handler which is not trivial to do if it's a library doing the send/recv. With sockets it can use send(fd, buf, MSG_NOSIGNAL) instead.