Question

I have the following c code. I want to display my file with less by calling execv()
however the following seems never work. The program terminates and noting pop out.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main(void){
  int pid; 
  if(pid=fork()>0){
      //read in from stdin and pass to pipe
   }else if(pid==0){
      //read from pipe
      //write to out.txt
      //everything up to here works fine

      char* para[]={"less","/Desktop/out.txt"};
      execv("/bin/less",para);
   }
   return 0;
}

Answer 1

(The original code contained execv("bin/less", para);.) Unless the current directory is the root directory, /, or unless there is a program less in the subdirectory ./bin/less, then one of your problems is that you have a probable typo in the name of the executable. That assumes the program is /bin/less and not /usr/bin/less. You might even use execvp() to do a PATH-based search for the program.

There’s an additional problem: you need to include a null pointer to mark the end of the argument list.

Finally, you can print an error message after the execv() returns. The mere fact that it returns tells you it failed.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    int pid;
    if ((pid = fork()) != 0)
    {
        // read in from stdin and pass to pipe
        // Need to test for fork() error here too
    }
    else
    {
        // read from pipe
        // write to out.txt
        // everything up to here works fine

        char *para[] = { "/bin/less", "Desktop/out.txt", 0 };
        execv(para[0], para);
        fprintf(stderr, "Failed to execute %s\n", para[0]);
        exit(1);
    }
    return 0;
}

Or:

        char *para[] = { "less", "Desktop/out.txt", 0 };
        execvp(para[0], para);
        fprintf(stderr, "Failed to execute %s\n", para[0]);

The remarks in the code about pipes are puzzling since there is no sign of pipes other than in the comments. As it stands, less will read the file it is told to read. Note that less will not paginate its output if the output is not going to a terminal. Since we can see no I/O redirection, we have to assume, then, that less will ignore anything the program tries to write to it, and will not send any data back to the program.