Question

I do the regular thing:

• fork()
• execvp(cmd, ) in child

If execvp fails because no cmd is found, how can I notice this error in parent process?

Answer 1

The well-known self-pipe trick can be adapted for this purpose.

#include <errno.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <sysexits.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    int pipefds[2];
    int count, err;
    pid_t child;

    if (pipe(pipefds)) {
        perror("pipe");
        return EX_OSERR;
    }
    if (fcntl(pipefds[1], F_SETFD, fcntl(pipefds[1], F_GETFD) | FD_CLOEXEC)) {
        perror("fcntl");
        return EX_OSERR;
    }

    switch (child = fork()) {
    case -1:
        perror("fork");
        return EX_OSERR;
    case 0:
        close(pipefds[0]);
        execvp(argv[1], argv + 1);
        write(pipefds[1], &errno, sizeof(int));
        _exit(0);
    default:
        close(pipefds[1]);
        while ((count = read(pipefds[0], &err, sizeof(errno))) == -1)
            if (errno != EAGAIN && errno != EINTR) break;
        if (count) {
            fprintf(stderr, "child's execvp: %s\n", strerror(err));
            return EX_UNAVAILABLE;
        }
        close(pipefds[0]);
        puts("waiting for child...");
        while (waitpid(child, &err, 0) == -1)
            if (errno != EINTR) {
                perror("waitpid");
                return EX_SOFTWARE;
            }
        if (WIFEXITED(err))
            printf("child exited with %d\n", WEXITSTATUS(err));
        else if (WIFSIGNALED(err))
            printf("child killed by %d\n", WTERMSIG(err));
    }
    return err;
}

Here’s a complete program.

$ ./a.out foo
child's execvp: No such file or directory
$ (sleep 1 && killall -QUIT sleep &); ./a.out sleep 60
waiting for child...
child killed by 3
$ ./a.out true
waiting for child...
child exited with 0

How this works:

Create a pipe, and make the write endpoint CLOEXEC: it auto-closes when an exec is successfully performed.

In the child, try to exec. If it succeeds, we no longer have control, but the pipe is closed. If it fails, write the failure code to the pipe and exit.

In the parent, try to read from the other pipe endpoint. If read returns zero, then the pipe was closed and the child must have exec successfully. If read returns data, it’s the failure code that our child wrote.