Exercises

The final challenge

The final challenge for this part of the unit is to write a C program that uses pipes to interact with bc to add the numbers from 1 to 10, as an example of concurrency and inter-process communication in action. For this, you will need to put together items from the previous pages for this activity.

The general ideas are:

1. Create two pipe variables called up and down.
2. Fork the process. This shares the pipes between both copies of the process.
3. The parent process will write to the down pipe and read from the up pipe, so it should close the down reader and the up writer.
4. The child process closes the down writer and the up reader, redirects its standard input to the down reader and its standard output to the up writer, and then execs bc. This keeps the redirected standard input and output.
5. The parent process now writes its sums starting with 1+2 to the down writer with write and then uses read on the up reader to get the result. You can use a function evaluate() like in the previous example that handles the reading/writing and prints debug information to standard output (we don't need standard error as the pipe is a separate file descriptor).
6. The parent cleanly closes the pipes when it is done, and writes the result to standard output.

Two constraints here:

• All calls to Posix or file I/O functions must be checked for error return values. It is ok to terminate the program in case of fatal errors rather than try and fix the cause, but not to just carry on ignoring the return value. You can reuse the check() function for this.
• Calls to read and write must be assumed to be able to fail with EINTR, in which case they need to be retried, so these functions must be called from within loops as you saw in the busybox sources.

The one new function you need to know is int dup2(int src, int dest) which redirects the destination to be a duplicate of the source. For example if dr is a file decriptor for the down reader, then ok = dup2(dr, 0) redirects standard input (file descriptor 0) to read from the down reader. Of course, you have to check the return value ok!

saved = dup(1);      check(saved, "duplicating standard output");
ok = dup2(3, 1);     check(ok, "redirecting standard output");
/* any printf etc here will go to the file on fd 3 */
ok = dup2(saved, 1); check(ok, "restoring standard output");
ok = close(saved);   check(ok, "closing duplicate");