Question

OK I have a program that creates two pipes -> forks -> the child’s stdin and stdout are redirected to one end of each pipe -> the parent is connected to the other ends of the pipes and tries to read the stream associated with the child’s output and print it to the screen (and I will also make it write to the input of the child eventually).

The problem is, when the parent tries to fgets the child’s output stream, it just stalls and waits until the child dies to fgets and then print the output. If the child doesn’t exit, it just waits forever. What is going on? I thought that maybe fgets would block until SOMETHING was in the stream, but not block all the way until the child gives up its file descriptors.

Here is the code:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
 FILE* fpin;
 FILE* fpout;
 int input_fd[2];
 int output_fd[2];
 pid_t pid;
 int status;
 char input[100];
 char output[100];
 char *args[] = {"/somepath/someprogram", NULL};
 fgets(input, 100, stdin); // the user inputs the program name to exec

 pipe(input_fd);
 pipe(output_fd);
 pid = fork();

 if (pid == 0) {
  close(input_fd[1]);
  close(output_fd[0]);
  dup2(input_fd[0], 0);
  dup2(output_fd[1], 1);
  input[strlen(input)-1] = '\0';
  execvp(input, args);
 }
 else {
  close(input_fd[0]);
  close(output_fd[1]);
  fpin = fdopen(input_fd[1], "w");
  fpout = fdopen(output_fd[0], "r");
  while(!feof(fpout)) {
   fgets(output, 100, fpout);
   printf("output: %s\n", output);
  }
 }

 return 0;
}

Answer 1

The child should probably fflush() its output, and/or terminate lines properly. Otherwise the I/O buffering can hang on to the data for quite a while.

You can try to set the O_NONBLOCK flag (using fcntl()) on the child’s output file descriptor before handing over control, but that will require you to change your parent code’s accordingly. As pointed out in comments though, this won’t help you overcome the buffering done at the C standard library level if the child uses FILE-based I/O.