When reading about pipes in Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, I noticed that after a fork that the parent can close() the read end of a pipe and it doesn't close the read end for the child. When a process forks, does its file descriptors get retained? What I mean by this is that before the fork the pipe read file descriptor had a retain count of 1, and after the fork 2. When the parent closed its read side the fd went to 1 and is kept open for the child. Is this essentially what is happening? Does this behavior also occur for regular file descriptors?