Turns out they were environmental problems and not code problems.

With my copy program, I had my open and create files swapped so I accidentally overwrote the old file with a clean new one without realizing it at one point, then switched them and went on my merry way, not checking to see if there were contents to the files. Thus it was behaving as it should, copying empty files. xD

With my parent/child program, I had the files on a memory stick and the file system format didn't allow for creation of pipes. Once I copied the files onto my hard drive and ran it the pipes were created and I was able to move forward.

The worst part is I spent at least four hours trying to fix code that wasn't broken. It was as bad as using = instead of == to test equality and not realizing it.