Question

Is there a standard way of sending floating point values from a child process to a parent process in C.

I have a some calculations where I want to fork a process, then have the child do some busy work, the parent do something else, and then the child send its values (which are doubles) back to the parent (presumably through a pipe). Clearly the parent could parse the stream, but I’m just wondering if there’s a cleaner way?

Answer 1

If you’re just sending them between two processes on the same machine, there’s no need to get fancy. On the sending side:

double my_float;
write(fd, &my_float, sizeof(myfloat));

And on the receiving side:

double my_float;
read(fd, &my_float, sizeof(my_float));

You should check the return values of write and read of course.