What really are descriptors?The fundamental building block of all I/O in Unix is a sequence of bytes. Most programs work with an even simpler abstraction — a stream of bytes or an I/O stream. A process references I/O streams with the help of descriptors, also known as file descriptors. Pipes, files, FIFOs, POSIX IPC’s (message queues, semaphores, shared memory), event queues are all examples of I/