Same pipe to multiple processes?

With several forks i plan to make several child processes.
Then i need to send the same message to all the child processes.

Can i do this with one single pipe, from witch each child can read, or do i need one pipe to each child?

Thank You

Yep.

but do i need to send the message several times or just once?

once a message is read from the pipe in one of the childs, is it still available for the other processes?

I'm not sure the answer, but my initial was if the children all get an exact copy of the parent's file descriptors (and then by transitivity, the same as each other), then if one child reads from the pipe, that advances the position for all children.

I cooked up a quick example to try and convince myself of this, and have succeeded.

Running the code below gives me the following output:

Code:

---

Child 1's first read: test1
Child 1's second read: test2
Child 2's first read: test3
Child 2's second read: test4

---

My code is:

Code:

---

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

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  int  pfd[2];
  int  pid[2];
  int  status;
  char buf[6];
 

  if (pipe(pfd) < 0) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Error creating pipe.\n");
    exit(0);
  }
 
  /* First Child */
  if ((pid[0] = fork())== 0) {
    /* Check for first message */
    read(pfd[0], buf, 5);
    buf[5] = '\0';
    printf("Child 1's first read: %s\n", buf);

    /* Check for second message */
    read(pfd[0], buf, 5);
    buf[5] = '\0';
    printf("Child 1's second read: %s\n", buf);

    exit(0);
  }

  /* Second Child */
  if ((pid[1] = fork()) == 0) {
    /* Check for first message */
    read(pfd[0], buf, 5);
    buf[5] = '\0';
    printf("Child 2's first read: %s\n", buf);

    /* Check for second message */
    read(pfd[0], buf, 5);
    buf[5] = '\0';
    printf("Child 2's second read: %s\n", buf);

    exit(0);
  }

  /* Parent */
  write(pfd[1], "test1", 5);
  write(pfd[1], "test2", 5);
  write(pfd[1], "test3", 5);
  write(pfd[1], "test4", 5);

  waitpid(pid[0], &status, 0);
  waitpid(pid[1], &status, 0);

  return 0;
}

---

I was just thinking...maybe an alternative to creating a pipe for each child would be to do multicasting with sockets? I couldn't tell you how to do it, but the concept might be what you are looking for.

thank you. i will look in to that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jason_m

I was just thinking...maybe an alternative to creating a pipe for each child would be to do multicasting with sockets? I couldn't tell you how to do it, but the concept might be what you are looking for.

---

I think multicasting requires an IP address and so is not suitable for local sockets, but I could be wrong.

However, using sockets could be an option if you don't want to create more than one file on disk (otherwise, you might as well create a pipe for each child and loop through those). You will still have to loop through and transmit to each connected child, tho, so it will amount to much the same thing.

My proposition is to use shared memory: one process writes to it and the other read without any copying. You can use pipes as a synchronization mechanism if you need to, but message will not be copied or send multiple times.

Daper
http://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com