fork() function will never return 0 - c

I am currently trying to run a fork function in C where in the child section of the code,
I am trying to execute a command using exacvp, but before the execution I am trying a printf function which never executes. I ran this in debug and I have noticed that the pid is never assigned 0. I did try a simple fork example on a separate project and it worked smoothly. Does anyone have an idea why the child section never executes?
int startProcesses(int background) {
int i = 0;
while(*(lineArray+i) != NULL) {
int pid;
int status;
char *processName;
pid = fork();
if (pid == 0) {
printf("I am child");
// Child Process
processName = strtok(lineArray[i], " ");
execvp(processName, lineArray[i]);
i++;
continue;
} else if (!background) {
// Parent Process
waitpid(pid, &status, 0);
i++;
if(WEXITSTATUS(status)) {
printf(CANNOT_RUN_ERROR);
return 1;
}
} else {
i++;
continue;
}
}
return 0;
}

stdio files are flushed on program's exit, but execvp directly replaces the process with another image, bypassing the flush-at-exit mechanism and leaving the I am child message in memory never to be sent to the screen. Add an explicit fflush(stdout) before execvp, or end your string with \n so that it is automatically flushed when running on a TTY.
Note that execvp never exits, and if it does, it is because it has failed to execute the new process. At that point, the only thing the child can do is to report an error and call _exit(127) (or similar exit status). If the child continues, an incorrectly configured command name will cause it to execute the rest of the parent's loop in parallel with the parent. This process will continue for other descendants, effectively creating a fork bomb that can grind your system to a halt.

Related

Forked child "prints" redirected stdout twice

Inside a while(1) I'm trying to:
spawn a child process with fork();
redirect the child process stdout so that the parent process can see it
print the result in the terminal from the parent process
repeat
Strangely, the output from the child process seems to be printed twice
// parentToChild and childToParent are the pipes I'm using
while(1) {
int pid = fork();
if(pid < 0) {
// error, get out
exit(0);
} else if(pid != 0) {
// parent process
close(parentToChild[0]); // don't need read end of parentToChild
close(childToParent[1]); // don't need write end of childToParent
sleep(4);
char respBuffer[400];
int respBufferLength = read(childToParent[0], respBuffer, sizeof(respBuffer));
printf("before\n");
printf("parent tried to read something from its child and got: %s\n", respBuffer);
printf("after\n");
} else if (pid == 0) {
if(dup2(childToParent[1], STDOUT_FILENO) < 0) {
// printf("dup2 error");
};
close(childToParent[1]);
close(childToParent[0]);
close(parentToChild[1]); // write end of parentToChild not used
printf("child message");
// if we don't exit here, we run the risk of repeatedly creating more processes in a loop
exit(0);
}
}
I would expect the ouput of the following loop at each iteration to be:
before
parent tried to read something from its child and got: child message
after
But instead, at each iteration I get:
before
parent tried to read something from its child and got: child message
after
child message
What's the reason behind the second print of "child message"?
Flushing the stdout buffers before calling fork() doesn't seem to solve the issue
Interestingly, removing the while loop and keeping everything else intact seems to work fine
In the first iteration of the loop, you close childToParent[1] in the parent, and you don't recreate the pipes, so in the second iteration of the loop, its trying to reuse those closed pipes, so the child's dup2 call fails, so its printf goes to the terminal. Meanwhile, in the parent, the read call returns 0 without writing anything to the buffer, so you just print the old contents.

Child process not exiting with fork()

I am creating a simple Linux command shell in C. I am having trouble understanding where my code is having problems. "commands" is a list of strings of Linux commands that I want to be executed concurrently as the children processes of one parent. When all are done executing, I want the parent to exit the function. However, when I call exit(0), the for loop continues and parses the current command again, causing the args to be executed again in execvp. Am I using fork() and wait() correctly here? I have tried using waitpid() as well with no luck.
void executeShell(char** commands){
char **arr = commands;
char *c;
pid_t pid, wpid;
int status = 0;
for (c = *arr; c; c=*++arr){
// printf("%d-\n", strcmp(command, "exit"));
if (strcmp(c, "exit") == 0){
EXIT = 1;
return;
}
printf("Running command \'%s\'...\n", c);
char** args = parseStringToTokenArray(c, " ");
free(args);
/* fork and execute the command */
pid = fork();
if(pid < 0){
perror("fork() error\n");
return;
}
/* child process executes command */
else if (pid == 0){
/* 'cd' is not a part of /bin library so handle it manually */
if (strcmp(args[0], "cd") == 0){
changeDirectory(args[1]);
}
else if (strcmp(args[0], "sdir") == 0){
searchDirectory(args[1]);
}else{
/* parse commands with arguments */
execvp(args[0], args);//execute the command
}
exit(0);// <-----command is finished, so why no exit?
}
}
/* wait for children to complete */
while((wpid = wait(&status)) > 0);
}
If execvp succeeds, the entire child process address space is replaced by the program invoked by execvp(). This means that the exit(0) will only ever be invoked following your two special cases i.e. cd and sdir. As far as your code is concerned execvp() should never return, unless there is an error.
A further problem is that you free args immediately after allocating it and then go on to use it in your child processes. This is undefined behaviour.
The only problem I see with your wait code is that, if any of the children block waiting for user input, the parent will block waiting for the child to exit.
The cd code, has no effect on any process except the child in which it is executed. The parent's current directory is not affected. As you state in the comments, this can bet fixed by handling cd in the parent without forking.

fork() - have parent process do work without waiting for child process

I'm making a shell in C for a school project that is capable of running processes in parallel if it is commanded to do so.
This is the loop of the shell application that waits for commands:
while (1) {
action = parseShellArgs();
if (action == 1) {
printf("Exiting...\n");
break;
} else if (action == 0) {
int pid = fork();
if (pid < 0) {
printf("Failed to fork\n");
} else if (pid == 0) {
(*NUM_PROCESSES_RUNNING)++;
printf("There are %d processes running\n", *NUM_PROCESSES_RUNNING);
char * solverArgs[] = {"a", shellArgs[1], NULL}; // first element is placeholder for argv[0]
execv("CircuitRouter-SeqSolver", solverArgs);
exit(0);
} else if (pid > 0) {
if (*NUM_PROCESSES_RUNNING >= MAXCHILDREN) {
printf("All processes are busy\n");
continue;
}
int status, childpid;
wait(&status);
childpid = WEXITSTATUS(status);
(*NUM_PROCESSES_RUNNING)--;
printf("There are %d processes running\n", *NUM_PROCESSES_RUNNING);
(void)childpid; // suppress "unused variable" warning
} else {
printf("Wait what\n");
}
} else {
printf("Oops, bad input\n");
}
}
Please do disregard the constants being incremented and decremented.
Now, this only works partially. Whenever I give it a command to create another process and run another program (condition action == 0, this has been tested and works), the fork happens and the program is correctly executed.
However, I cannot fork multiple times. What I mean by this is: the program forks and the child executes as instructed in the execv call. The problem is that instead of the parent process then goes back to expecting input to possibly fork again, it waits for the child process to finish.
What I am trying to make this cycle do is for the parent to always be expecting input and forking as commanded, having multiple children if necessary. But as I explained above, the parent gets "stuck" waiting for the single child to finish and only then resumes activity.
Thank you in advance.
Edit: I have experimented multiple combinations of not waiting for the child process, using extra forks to expect input etc.
From man wait.2
The wait() system call suspends execution of the calling process until
one of its children terminates.
Your program gets stuck because that's what wait does. Use waitpid instead with WNOHANG.
waitpid(pid_child, &status, WNOHANG);
doesn't suspend execution of the calling process. You can read the waitpid man page to find out the return values and how to know if a child terminated.

How to terminate a program from a child process?

I am trying to terminate my program which takes a line that is full of commands from a file and then process each command using execvp
However,Whenever I encounter quit, I want to immediately exit processing the commands and ignore all other commands that are coming after it.
I tried to do this the following way using exit()
for(int i =0;i < numOfCommands;i++)
{
childPid = fork();
if(childPid == 0)
{
if(execvp(commands[i].cmd[0],commands[i].cmd) == -1)
{
/*if(strcmp(commands[i].cmd[0],"quit"))
{
done = true;
return;
}*/
if(strcmp(commands[i].cmd[0],"quit")==0)
{
printf("Quit command found ! \n Quitting .");
done = true;
//return;
exit(0);
}
printf("Command %s is unknown \n", commands[i].cmd[0]);
}
}
else
{
//parent process
wait(&child_status);
}
}
}
And this happens inside of the child process, after forking of course. But the problem is that my program keeps processing the remaining commands that comes after quit before exiting the program !
You can use kill(2) to send a signal to the process group. You can do this in the parent or any of the children.
int kill(pid_t pid, int sig);
If pid equals 0, then sig is sent to every process in the process group of the calling process.
For example:
kill(0, SIGTERM);
I think a better way to deal with this is to check for the quit command in the parent process before forking the child.
But if you want to do it in the child, you can send a signal to the parent.
kill(getppid(), SIGUSR1);
The parent process will need to establish a signal handler for SIGUSR1 that cleans everything up and exits. Or you could send a signal like SIGINT, whose default action is to kill the process, but it's better to implement a clean exit.
Also, in your code, you should check for the quit command before calling execvp. Otherwise, if there's a quit program in the user's path, it will never match your built-in quit, since execvp will succeed and not return.

How to fork and create a specific number of children that perform the same task?

I need to write a C program that calls fork() a given number of times. Each child process needs to perform the same task (adding some random numbers until a given sum is reached). The parent process waits until all of the child processes have exited. I have written the following code but my output shows that another child doesn't start executing its code until the first one is done.
for (i = 0; i < num_forks; i++) {
child_pid = fork();
if (child_pid < 0) {
perror("fork\n");
} else if (child_pid == 0) {
childProcess(i, goal);
} else {
parentProcess();
}
}
EDIT: The objective is to have all of the child processes run simultaneously. The parent waits for any of the child processes to exit. As soon as any one child process exits, the parent process prints the pid of the child that exited. The remaining child processes continue to run simulatenously until another child exits and so on. If I call parentProcess() outside of the loop, the parent only prints the exiting child pid when the last child process exits.
You need to move the call to parentProcess() outside the loop:
for (i = 0; i < num_forks; i++) {
child_pid = fork();
if (child_pid < 0) {
perror("fork\n");
} else if (child_pid == 0) {
childProcess(i, goal);
}
}
parentProcess();
Otherwise, the parent waits for each child in turn before running the next.
You should be using wait() or waitpid() in a loop inside parentProcess() to collect all the children as they die — and you may do well to provide num_forks as an argument to parentProcess(). Or you need to redefine what you want done. The question suggests that you want the children running simultaneously, while the parent waits for them all to die. That means you have to launch all the children before waiting for them — subject to not running out of processes (so num_forks is a sane number like 20, not an insane number like 2,000 or 2,000,000).
So, your code in parentProcess() should be roughly like this, as a basic minimum:
void parentProcess(void)
{
int status;
int corpse;
while ((corpse = wait(&status)) != -1)
printf("%5d: 0x%.4X\n", corpse, status);
}
And this should be called outside the loop. If called inside the loop, the parent will launch one child, wait for it to finish, then repeat the process. I assume that the childProcess() function never returns; it will lead to chaos if it does return.

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