Thread: Help with forking processes

I am writing a program that emulates a shell. I am supposed to be able to background processes or run them in the foreground. I looked up some examples like this, however my program is freezing up when my parent process is (supposedly) waiting for the child. It always gets to the line

Code:

if(waitpid(pid, &status, 0) != pid)

and just hangs there. I end up having to kill the program with CTRL + C. As a side note, can anybody explain to me how to background a process and how to wait for all of my child processes to be finished before the program exits on command?

Code:

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

int main(void){
    int repeat = 1;
    char args[MAX_ARGS][CMD_LEN];

    while(repeat){
        fprintf(stdout, ":~$ ");
        
        Param_t *params = new_paramt();
        if(params == NULL){
            fprintf(stdout, "Memory allocation failed");
            exit(1);
        }

        init_args(args);
        char command[CMD_LEN];
        fgets(command, CMD_LEN, stdin);        
        format_args(command, params, args);

        if(!strcmp(params->program, EXIT)){
            repeat = 0;
        }
        else{
            pid_t pid;
            int status;

            pid = fork();
            if(pid == 0){
                if(params->outputRedirect){
                    FILE *fout = freopen(params->outputRedirect, "w", stdout);
                    if(!(fout)){
                        fprintf(stdout, "Error! Output redirection failed.");
                    }
                }
                if(params->inputRedirect){
                    FILE *fin = freopen(params->outputRedirect, "r", stdin);
                    if(!(fin)){
                        fprintf(stdout, "Error! Input redirection failed.");
                    }
                }
                execvp(params->program, params->argumentVector);
            }
            else if(pid < 0){
                fprintf(stdout, "Error! Process fork failed.");
                status = -1;
            }
            else{
                if(waitpid(pid, &status, 0) != pid){
                    status = -1;
                }
                return status;
            }
        }
        free_param_t(params);
    }
    return 0;
}

If waitpid() is appearing to hang, that means the child has not exited. To have a process run in the background, but still be able to reap children, look at the WNOHANG flag for waitpid().

To wait for all children, you can just call wait() in a loop; or if you want to wait for specific children that you've forked (instead of any children), call waitpid() with the childrens' pids, in a loop.

Originally Posted by cas

If waitpid() is appearing to hang, that means the child has not exited. To have a process run in the background, but still be able to reap children, look at the WNOHANG flag for waitpid().

I added the WNOHANG option earlier and when I step through the program in gdb the child process is never executed. The parent always comes up first, and in the case where WNOHANG is a parameter of waitpid(), status is returned inside of the parent process, and then the whole program finishes executing.

Originally Posted by cas

To wait for all children, you can just call wait() in a loop; or if you want to wait for specific children that you've forked (instead of any children), call waitpid() with the childrens' pids, in a loop

If I call wait in a loop do I just call it until it returns an error?

Code:

while(wait(&status) != -1)

Originally Posted by Lubert

I added the WNOHANG option earlier and when I step through the program in gdb the child process is never executed. The parent always comes up first, and in the case where WNOHANG is a parameter of waitpid(), status is returned inside of the parent process, and then the whole program finishes executing.

Are you sure gdb can follow children? And when you use WNOHANG, are you sure that it's actually reaping the child? That is, are you checking waitpid()'s return value?

If fork() is not returning -1, then it's essentially impossible for a child process not to have been created.

Originally Posted by Lubert

If I call wait in a loop do I just call it until it returns an error?

Code:

while(wait(&status) != -1)

Yes, more or less. You'll probably want to check errno and make sure that the -1 return value is because of ECHILD (no children available).

Originally Posted by cas

Are you sure gdb can follow children? And when you use WNOHANG, are you sure that it's actually reaping the child? That is, are you checking waitpid()'s return value?

I didn't think that gdb might not be able to follow the child process...I guess I need to find a different way to debug.

As for the reaping and checking of waitpid()'s return value, I am not sure...I am slightly confused now about what is happening and what needs to be done.

If you call waitpid() on a process, and set WNOHANG, waitpid() will return immediately if the process is not dead yet. Of course, it will return immediately if the process is dead, so how do you tell the difference? You check the return value. waitpid() returns 0 if the requested child is not dead. It returns the pid of the child that it successfully reaped, or -1 if there was some error.

The point is, you can periodically call waitpid() with WNOHANG to see if children have died (say, every time the user enters some input); if no children are ready to be reaped, you won't cause the process to hang, but if children are ready, you'll be able to reap them so you avoid zombies.

Alrighty. All of that makes sense. However, my still very big problem is that shell programs are never being run with execvp() in the child process. All of my arguments for execvp() look good when I am in gdb, but I don't get any output when I run "ls -al" or anything.