How to handle execvp(...) errors after fork()?

Question

I do the regular thing:

• fork()
• execvp(cmd, ) in child

If execvp fails because no cmd is found, how can I notice this error in parent process?

Answer 1

You terminate the child (by calling _exit()) and then the parent can notice this (through e.g. waitpid()). For instance, your child could exit with an exit status of -1 to indicate failure to exec. One caveat with this is that it is impossible to tell from your parent whether the child in its original state (i.e. before exec) returned -1 or if it was the newly executed process.

As suggested in the comments below, using an "unusual" return code would be appropiate to make it easier to distinguish between your specific error and one from the exec()'ed program. Common ones are 1, 2, 3 etc. while higher numbers 99, 100, etc. are more unusual. You should keep your numbers below 255 (unsigned) or 127 (signed) to increase portability.

Since waitpid blocks your application (or rather, the thread calling it) you will either need to put it on a background thread or use the signalling mechanism in POSIX to get information about child process termination. See the SIGCHLD signal and the sigaction function to hook up a listener.

You could also do some error checking before forking, such as making sure the executable exists.

If you use something like Glib, there are utility functions to do this, and they come with pretty good error reporting. Take a look at the "spawning processes" section of the manual.

Answer 2

Well, you could use the wait/waitpid functions in the parent process. You can specify a status variable that holds info about the status of the process that terminated. The downside is that the parent process is blocked until the child process finishes execution.

Answer 3

Not should you wonder how you can notice it in parent process, but also you should keep in mind that you must notice the error in parent process. That's especially true for multithreaded applications.

After execvp you must place a call to function that terminates the process in any case. You should not call any complex functions that interact with C library (such as stdio), since effects of them may mingle with pthreads of libc functionality of parent process. So you can't print a message with printf() in child process and have to inform parent about the error instead.

The easiest way, among the other, is passing return code. Supply nonzero argument to _exit() function (see note below) you used to terminate the child and then examine the return code in the parent. Here's the example:

int pid, stat;
pid = fork();
if (pid == 0){
   // Child process
   execvp(cmd);
   if (errno == ENOENT)
     _exit(-1);
   _exit(-2);
}

wait(&stat);
if (!WIFEXITED(stat)) { // Error happened 
...
}

---

Instead of _exit(), you might think of exit() function, but it's incorrect, since this function will do a part of the C-library cleanup that should be done only when parent process terminates. Instead, use _exit() function, that doesn't do such a cleanup.

Answer 4

1) Use _exit() not exit() - see http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xsh/vfork.html - NB: applies to fork() as well as vfork().

2) The problem with doing more complicated IPC than the exit status, is that you have a shared memory map, and it's possible to get some nasty state if you do anything too complicated - e.g. in multithreaded code, one of the killed threads (in the child) could have been holding a lock.

Answer 5

Hi Pavel. It seems I may finally get help to one of the subtle questions disturbng me.

"After execvp you must place a call to function that terminates the process in any case".

Well, "execvp()" replaces the current program with the to-be-execed program (of course in the same process context). So, putting, say, any printf() calls after execvp() won't work. That is what the docs say, and I have verified it as well.

But then, why is _exit() needed..? Does it so happen that the control DOES return to statements post execvp() ?

I will be grateful for any pointers.

Thanks