how to control popen stdin, stdout, stderr redirection?

Question

I am confused about how popen() redirects stdin, stdout and stderr of the child process in unix. The man page on popen() is not very clear in this regard. The call

FILE *p = popen("/usr/bin/foo", "w"); 

forks a child process and executes a shell with arguments "-c", "/usr/bin/foo", and redirects stdin of this shell (which is redirected stdin of foo), stdout to p. But what happens with stderr? What is the general principle behind it?

I noticed that, if I open a file in foo (using fopen, socket, accept etc.), and the parent process has no stdout, it gets assigned the next available file number, which is 1 and so on. This delivers unexpected results from calls like fprintf(stderr, ...).

It can be avoided by writing

FILE *p = popen("/usr/bin/foo 2>/dev/null", "w"); 

in the parent program, but are their better ways?

Answer 1

popen(3) is just a library function, which relies on fork(2) and pipe(2) to do the real work.

However pipe(2) can only create unidirectional pipes. To send the child process input, and also capture the output, you need to open two pipes.

If you want to capture the stderr too, that's possible, but then you'll need three pipes, and a select loop to arbitrate reads between the stdout and stderr streams.

There's an example here for the two-pipe version.

Answer 2

simple idea: why not add "2>&1" to the command string to force the bash to redirect stderr to stdout (OK, writing to stdin still is not possible but at least we get stderr and stdout into our C program).