Connecting n commands with pipes in a shell?

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Nothing complex here, just have in mind that the last command should output to the original process’ file descriptor 1 and the first should read from original process file descriptor 0. You just spawn the processes in order, carrying along the input side of the previous pipe call.

So, here’s are the types:

#include <unistd.h>

struct command
{
  const char **argv;
};

Make a helper function with a simple well defined semantics:

int
spawn_proc (int in, int out, struct command *cmd)
{
  pid_t pid;

  if ((pid = fork ()) == 0)
    {
      if (in != 0)
        {
          dup2 (in, 0);
          close (in);
        }

      if (out != 1)
        {
          dup2 (out, 1);
          close (out);
        }

      return execvp (cmd->argv [0], (char * const *)cmd->argv);
    }

  return pid;
}

And here’s the main fork routine:

int
fork_pipes (int n, struct command *cmd)
{
  int i;
  pid_t pid;
  int in, fd [2];

  /* The first process should get its input from the original file descriptor 0.  */
  in = 0;

  /* Note the loop bound, we spawn here all, but the last stage of the pipeline.  */
  for (i = 0; i < n - 1; ++i)
    {
      pipe (fd);

      /* f [1] is the write end of the pipe, we carry `in` from the prev iteration.  */
      spawn_proc (in, fd [1], cmd + i);

      /* No need for the write end of the pipe, the child will write here.  */
      close (fd [1]);

      /* Keep the read end of the pipe, the next child will read from there.  */
      in = fd [0];
    }

  /* Last stage of the pipeline - set stdin be the read end of the previous pipe
     and output to the original file descriptor 1. */  
  if (in != 0)
    dup2 (in, 0);

  /* Execute the last stage with the current process. */
  return execvp (cmd [i].argv [0], (char * const *)cmd [i].argv);
}

And a small test:

int
main ()
{
  const char *ls[] = { "ls", "-l", 0 };
  const char *awk[] = { "awk", "{print $1}", 0 };
  const char *sort[] = { "sort", 0 };
  const char *uniq[] = { "uniq", 0 };

  struct command cmd [] = { {ls}, {awk}, {sort}, {uniq} };

  return fork_pipes (4, cmd);
}

Appears to work. 🙂

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