Read from unix pipe when there's no one to write to it. (C++)

Question

If I spawn a child and pass him a pipe, the child writes to the output of the pipe(to the parent) and after that the child dies. Can the parent read from the pipe what the child had written before it died? Thanks. (ps: I'm talking about C++)

Answer 1

Yes, but watch for the buffer space: if the parent is not yet reading, the child will not be able to write more than the buffer size, which is different from system to system, 16k on mine.