Communicating between applications?

I am very new to programming, and have had no formal training in it before so please bear with me if this is a vague question.

I was just curious: how do different programs on the same computer communicate with each other? From my pro开发者_C百科gramming experience I believe it can be achieved by socket programming?

Thanks

---

You can rely on all different kind of inter process communication. (IPC). Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication

On linux, dbus is used to make applications communicate together. Sockets are only one way to solve this provlem.

---

Sockets, shared memory, events / signals, pipes, semaphores, message queues, mailslots. Just search the Internet for either.

---

You can use WM_COPYDATA in Windows which is a really easy way to send data between different applications/processes.

And here is a list of other methods that work cross platforms, and with many different languages.