Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment

ptg10805159

Section 15.3 popenandpcloseFunctions 541

We create two pipes beforethefork, as shown in Figure15.8. The parent writes the

character ‘‘p’’across the top pipe whenTELL_CHILDis called, and the child writes the

character ‘‘c’’across the bottom pipe whenTELL_PARENTis called. The corresponding

WAIT_xxxfunctions do a blockingreadfor the single character.

parent child

pfd1[1]

pfd2[0]

pfd1[0]

pfd2[1]

"p"

"c"

Figure 15.8Using two pipes for parent–child synchronization

Note that each pipe has an extra reader,which doesn’t matter.That is, in addition

to the child reading frompfd1[0],the parent has this end of the top pipe open for

reading. This doesn’t affect us, since the parent doesn’t try to read from this pipe.

15.3 popenandpclose Functions

Since a common operation is to create a pipe to another process to either read its output

or send it input, the standardI/O library has historically provided thepopenand

pclosefunctions. These two functions handle all the dirty work that we’ve been doing

ourselves: creating a pipe,forking a child, closing the unused ends of the pipe,

executing a shell to run the command, and waiting for the command to terminate.

#include <stdio.h>

FILE *popen(const char *cmdstring,const char *type);

Returns: file pointer if OK,NULLon error

int pclose(FILE *fp);

Returns: termination status ofcmdstring,or−1 on error

The functionpopendoes aforkandexecto execute thecmdstringand returns a

standardI/O file pointer.Iftypeis"r",the file pointer is connected to the standard

output ofcmdstring(Figure15.9).

parent cmdstring(child)

fp stdout

Figure 15.9Result offp = popen(cmdstring,"r")

Iftypeis"w",the file pointer is connected to the standardinput ofcmdstring, as shown

in Figure15.10.