Your task is to create a system with one parent process and two child processes where the children communicate using a pipe.
Open a terminal and navigate to the module-2/mandatory
directory.
The ls
shell command list directory content. Execute the ls
command in the
terminal.
$ ls
Makefile bin obj src
The -F
option appends a slash /
to directory entries.
$ ls -F
Makefile bin/ obj/ src/
The only file in the directory is Makefile
. The directory contains the
subdirectories bin
, obj
and src
.
$ ls -F -1
Makefile
bin/
obj/
src/
The nl
shell command is a filter that reads lines from stdin and echoes each
line prefixed with a line number to stdout. In the terminal, type nl
and press
enter.
$ nl
The nl
command now waits for stdin input. Type Some text
and press enter.
$ nl
Some text
1 Some text
Type More text
and press enter.
$ nl
Some text
1 Some text
More text
2 More text
For each line you type, the line is echoed back with a line number. Play around
some more with the nl
command. Press Ctrl+D
(End Of File) to make the nl
command exit.
One of the philosophies behind Unix is the motto do one thing and do it well. In this spirit, each shell command usually have a very specific purpose. More complicated commands can be constructed by combining simpler commands in a pipeline such that the output of one command becomes the input to another command.
The standard shell syntax for
pipelines is to list multiple commands, separated by vertical bars |
(the pipe
character). In the below example the output from the ls -F -1
command is piped to input of the nl
command.
$ ls -F -1 | nl
1 Makefile
2 bin/
3 obj/
4 src/
All shell commands are ordinary programs. When the shell executes a command, the shell first forks a new process and uses exec to make the new process execute the command program.
The which
utility locates a program executable in the user’s PATH. Use which
to
see which program executables the shell uses for the ls
and nl
commands.
$ which ls
/bin/ls
$ which nl
/bin/nl
The executables for the ls
and nl
command programs are both located in the
/bin
directory.
Your task is to create a program that mimics the ls -F -1 | nl
pipeline. The
parent process uses fork to create two child processes. Child A uses exec
to execute the ls -F -1
command and Child B uses exec to execute the
nl
command. The children uses a pipe to communicate. The stdout of Child A is
redirected to the write end of the pipe. The stdin of the Child B is redirected
to the read end of the pipe.
How can you make the child process share a pipe? Which process should create the pipe? When should the pipe be created?
The parent must use fork twice, once for each child process.
The parent should use wait
to twice to wait for both child process to
terminate.
The child process should use execlp to execute their commands.
The child process should use dup2
to redirect stdout and stdin.
Don’t forget to close unused pipe file descriptors, otherwise a reader or writer might be blocked .
Attempt | Conditions | Result |
---|---|---|
Read | Empty pipe, writers attached | Reader blocked |
Read | Empty pipe, no writer attached | End Of File (EOF) returned |
Write | Full pipe, readers attached | Writer blocked |
Write | No readers attached | SIGPIPE |
Closing a read descriptor to early may cause a SIGPIPE.
Beware of SIGPIPE
The default SIGPIPE signal handler causes the process to terminate.
You should check the return values of all system calls to detect errors. On error use
perror to print an error message and then terminate with exit(EXIT_FAILURE)
.
Use the file module-2/mandatory/pipeline.c
to implement your solution.
main
function. You must add code here.child_a
function. You must add code here.child_b
function. You must add code here.Use make to compile.
$ make
Run the program.
$ ./bin/pipeline
When running the finished program you should see output similar to this.
$ ./bin/pipeline
1 Makefile
2 bin/
3 obj/
4 src/
$
Make sure you get the shell prompt $
back.