Pipe implementation

Question

I am trying to implement a linux shell that supports piping. I have already done simple commands, commands running in background, redirections, but piping is still missing.

I have already read about it and seen some snippets of code, but still haven't been able to sort out a working solution.

What I have so far:

int fd[2];

pipe(fd);

pid_t pid = fork();

if (pid == -1)  
   return -1;  

if (pid == 0)  
{  
   close(fd[1]); //close write to pipe, in child
   execlp("cat", "cat", "names.txt", NULL);
}

else
{
   close(fd[0]); //close read from pipe, in parent
   execlp("sort", "sort", NULL);
}  

I am a novice programmer, as you can probably tell, and when I am programming something I don't know much about, this being obviously the case, I like to start with something really easy and concrete and then build from there.

So, before being able to implement three and more different commands in pipeline, I would like to be able to compute "ls names.txt | sort" or something similiar, in which names.txt is a file of names alfabetically unordered.

Updated code, but still doesn't work.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Look into the pipe() standard library call. This is used to create a pipe. You must of course do part of the work before you fork(), in order for the child process to inherit the file descriptor properly.

Also note the order of the arguments to dup2():

int dup2(int oldfd, int newfd);

dup2() makes newfd be the copy of oldfd, closing newfd first if necessary

Answer 2

You need to replace one child's stdout with the writing end of the pipe, and the other child's stdin with the reading end:

if (pid == 0)  
{  
   close(fd[1]); //close write to pipe, in child
   dup2(fd[0], STDIN_FILENO); // Replace stdin with the read end of the pipe
   close(fd[0]); // Don't need another copy of the pipe read end hanging about
   execlp("cat", "cat", "names.txt", NULL);
}
else
{
   close(fd[0]); //close read from pipe, in parent
   dup2(fd[1], STDOUT_FILENO); // Replace stdout with the write end of the pipe
   close(fd[1]); // Don't need another copy of the pipe write end hanging about
   execlp("sort", "sort", NULL);
}