Redirect stdout and stderr to socket for a distributed shell program

Question

I made a distributed shell program that has a client and server. The client sends a command request to the server and the server executes that command locally and is supposed to output the results of that command to the client. I am having trouble figuring out how to redirect stdout/stderr to the client. I use execvp to execute the command.

I think I might have to use dup2? But I can't figure out how to use it properly. Any help?

Answer 1

You just need to use dup2() to duplicate the socket's file descriptor onto the stderr and stdout file descriptors. It's pretty much the same thing as redirecting to pipes.

cpid = fork();
if (cpid == 0) {
  dup2(sockfd, STDOUT_FILENO);
  dup2(sockfd, STDERR_FILENO);
  execvp(...);
  /*... etc. etc. */