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Asked: 2026-05-30T05:02:56+00:00

I called strace on some program A which forks two child programs: B and

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I called strace on some program A which forks two child programs: B and C.

In strace, I have the following syscalls:

 pipe[([3,4]) = 0
 pipe([5,6]) = 0
 fork(wc) = 7135
 fork (gnetcat) = 7136
 close(3) = 0
 close(5) = 0
 close(4) = 0
 close(6) = 0
 wait4(-1, NULL, 0, NULL) = 7136
 wait4(-1, NUKLL, 0, NULL) = 7135

I am trying to rewrite the program A in C. In that case, I really never really have to know what those file descriptors 3,4,5 and 6 stand for, do I? Is there a way to find out what they are? I know 3 is for stderr.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    0 ist STDIN, 1 is STDOUT and 2 is STDERR. All higher numbers are up to the application. In this case I suspect they are used to capture stdout/stderr of the freshly forked programs. This would mean that “wc” probably runs with its stdout connected to fd 3 and stderr to fd 4, so the main application can could the output of wc.

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