Last week, I showed you how to redirect a program's input or output from
the command line. Today, we will see how to accomplish the same task
programmatically.

The popen() Syscall
The system() command launches a new child process allowing it to read
from the standard input and write to the standard output. However, in
many cases, you want the child process to read input from the parent
process or direct its output to the parent process instead of the
standard output. The popen() syscall enables you to achieve this:

FILE * popen(const char * command, const char * mode);

The first parameter is the command the name of the executable to be
launched. The second parameter should be "r" if the parent wants to read
the output from child, or "w" if it wishes to write to the child's
standard input (you can't combine both at once with popen()). popen()
returns FILE*, which can be read from or written to, or NULL if the call
fails. Just as with ordinary stdio files, you must close the pipe by
calling pclose() after the I/O operation is completed. In addition, you
should flush the stream after writing to it to prevent delays due to
stdio buffering.

The following program launches a child process called "converter" that
converts Fahrenheit degrees to Celsius. The parent process passes
converter an expression for evaluation and waits for it to evaluate it.
Finally, the parent process closes the pipe and exits too:

#include
#include
#include

int main()
{
char buff[1024]={0};
FILE * cvt;
int status;
/*launch converter and open a pipe through which the
parent will write to it */
cvt=popen("converter", "w");
if (!cvt)
{
printf("couldn't open a pipe; quitting\n");
exit(1)
}
printf("enter Fahrenheit degrees: " );
fgets(buff, sizeof (buff), stdin); /*read user's input*/
/*send expression to converter for evaluation*/
fprintf(cvt, "%s\n", buff);
fflush(cvt);
/*close pipe to converter and wait for it to exit*/
status=pclose(cvt);
/*check the exit status of pclose()*/
if (!WIFEXITED(status))
printf("error on closing the pipe\n");
return 0;
}

The important steps in this program are:

1) The popen() call which establishes the association between a
child process and a pipe in the parent.
2) The fprintf() call that uses the pipe as an ordinary file to
write to the child process's stdin or read from its stdout.
3) The pclose() call that closes the pipe and causes the child
process to terminate.

» posted by ITworld staff

ITworld

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