Pipes, dup2 and exec()

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You need to close all the pipe descriptors in both the parent process and the child process (after duplication in the child process). In your code the main issue is that, the wc process does not exit because there are still writers present (since the parent process has not closed the write end). Changes shown below. I have also added the waitpid in the parent process to wait for the wc process.

pid_t pid;
int fd[2];

pipe(fd);
pid = fork();

if(pid==0)
{
    dup2(fd[WRITE_END], STDOUT_FILENO);
    close(fd[READ_END]);
    close(fd[WRITE_END]);
    execlp(firstcmd, firstcmd, frsarg, (char*) NULL);
    fprintf(stderr, "Failed to execute '%s'\n", firstcmd);
    exit(1);
}
else
{ 
    pid=fork();

    if(pid==0)
    {
        dup2(fd[READ_END], STDIN_FILENO);
        close(fd[WRITE_END]);
        close(fd[READ_END]);
        execlp(scmd, scmd, secarg,(char*) NULL);
        fprintf(stderr, "Failed to execute '%s'\n", scmd);
        exit(1);
    }
    else
    {
        int status;
        close(fd[READ_END]);
        close(fd[WRITE_END]);
        waitpid(pid, &status, 0);
    }
}

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