Question

I’m writing a C program where I fork(), exec(), and wait(). I’d like to take the output of the program I exec’ed to write it to file or buffer.

For example, if I exec ls I want to write file1 file2 etc to buffer/file. I don’t think there is a way to read stdout, so does that mean I have to use a pipe? Is there a general procedure here that I haven’t been able to find?

Answer 1

For sending the output to another file (I’m leaving out error checking to focus on the important details):

if (fork() == 0)
{
    // child
    int fd = open(file, O_RDWR | O_CREAT, S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR);

    dup2(fd, 1);   // make stdout go to file
    dup2(fd, 2);   // make stderr go to file - you may choose to not do this
                   // or perhaps send stderr to another file

    close(fd);     // fd no longer needed - the dup'ed handles are sufficient

    exec(...);
}

For sending the output to a pipe so you can then read the output into a buffer:

int pipefd[2];
pipe(pipefd);

if (fork() == 0)
{
    close(pipefd[0]);    // close reading end in the child

    dup2(pipefd[1], 1);  // send stdout to the pipe
    dup2(pipefd[1], 2);  // send stderr to the pipe

    close(pipefd[1]);    // this descriptor is no longer needed

    exec(...);
}
else
{
    // parent

    char buffer[1024];

    close(pipefd[1]);  // close the write end of the pipe in the parent

    while (read(pipefd[0], buffer, sizeof(buffer)) != 0)
    {
    }
}