UNIX Pipes Between Child Processes

Question

I'm trying to write a program that will spawn an arbitrary number of child processes and pipe between them, similar to a command line pipeline. In my case I'm trying to do "ls -l | more" and output that to stdout, then have the parent continue executing more commands.

I have the following code as a minimal example:

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
    int fd[2];
    pipe(fd); 
    chdir("/directory/with/lots/of/files");

    // Create one child process for more
    int pid = fork();
    if (pid == 0) {
        close(fd[1]);
        int ret = dup2(fd[0],0);
        if (ret < 0) perror("dup2");
        char *argv[10];
        argv[0] = "more";  argv[1] = NULL;
        execvp("more", argv);
    } 
    // Create another child process for ls
    int pid2 = fork();
    if (pid2 == 0) {
        int ret = dup2(fd[1],1);
        if (ret < 0) perror("dup2");
        char *argv[10];
        argv[0] = "ls";    argv[1] = "-l";   
        argv[2] = NULL;
        execvp("ls", argv);
    }

    // wait for the more process to finish
    int status;
    waitpid(pid, &status, 0);

    printf("Done!\n");
    return 0;
}

Now, when I execute the program (enclosed in a main() function of course) what I end up with is more, which is expected. I'll hit "d" to page down more's output and "u" to go up, and it seems to work fine. But when I reach the bottom, instead of exiting like more does, it just leaves a blank line. Ctrl-C works to exit it but it exits the entire program, meaning the "Done!" line never gets printed. A movie is available here that illustrates what happens (note that at the very end I press Ctrl-C to get back to bash).

Any thoughts on this? I'm just trying to figure out how to change it to where instead of going to a blank line after more reaches the bottom, more quits and returns to the parent process so it can continue executing.

Answer 1

You need to close() at least the writing end of your pipe, otherwise more will never see EOF. For example:

    ...

    // close parent's pipes
    close(fd[0]);
    close(fd[1]);

    // wait for the more process to finish
    int status;
    waitpid(pid, &status, 0);

    printf("Done!\n");
    return 0;
}