LibIPC is a socket library for InterProcess Communication written in C. It was designed and implemented by John Sloan while he was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. It was developed in 1992 through 1994. It was initially applied in a distributed spooling system called TAGS, for Text And Graphics System, hosted on multiprocessor Sun servers. LibIPC has been used in other projects at NCAR since then.

LibIPC is still useful today as a working reference for how the Berkeley socket interface works, and how a higher level abstraction to the interface can be designed. Although many socket libraries exist today, at the time LibIPC was written abstraction layers for the Berkeley interface were not common. See also the LibMessage library, which uses LibTools and LibIPC to implement a multiplexing message passing interface.

A technical report describing this and related libraries can be found here .

LibIPC is the intellectual property of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Boulder, Colorado. UCAR licenses LibIPC for free for non-commercial purposes. A license agreement is included in the compressed tar ball, which can be found here.