popen simultaneous read and write [duplicate]

c++ c

Is it possible to read and write to a file descriptor returned by popen. I have an interactive process I'd like to control through C. If this isn't possible with popen, is there any way around it?

As already answered, popen works in one direction. If you need to read and write, You can create a pipe with pipe(), span a new process by fork() and exec functions and then redirect its input and outputs with dup2(). Anyway I prefer exec over popen, as it gives you better control over the process (e.g. you know its pid)

EDITED:

As comments suggested, a pipe can be used in one direction only. Therefore you have to create separate pipes for reading and writing. Since the example posted before was wrong, I deleted it and created a new, correct one:

#include<unistd.h>
#include<sys/wait.h>
#include<sys/prctl.h>
#include<signal.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#include<string.h>
#include<stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  pid_t pid = 0;
  int inpipefd[2];
  int outpipefd[2];
  char buf[256];
  char msg[256];
  int status;

  pipe(inpipefd);
  pipe(outpipefd);
  pid = fork();
  if (pid == 0)
  {
    // Child
    dup2(outpipefd[0], STDIN_FILENO);
    dup2(inpipefd[1], STDOUT_FILENO);
    dup2(inpipefd[1], STDERR_FILENO);

    //ask kernel to deliver SIGTERM in case the parent dies
    prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, SIGTERM);

    //replace tee with your process
    execl("/usr/bin/tee", "tee", (char*) NULL);
    // Nothing below this line should be executed by child process. If so, 
    // it means that the execl function wasn't successfull, so lets exit:
    exit(1);
  }
  // The code below will be executed only by parent. You can write and read
  // from the child using pipefd descriptors, and you can send signals to 
  // the process using its pid by kill() function. If the child process will
  // exit unexpectedly, the parent process will obtain SIGCHLD signal that
  // can be handled (e.g. you can respawn the child process).

  //close unused pipe ends
  close(outpipefd[0]);
  close(inpipefd[1]);

  // Now, you can write to outpipefd[1] and read from inpipefd[0] :  
  while(1)
  {
    printf("Enter message to send\n");
    scanf("%s", msg);
    if(strcmp(msg, "exit") == 0) break;

    write(outpipefd[1], msg, strlen(msg));
    read(inpipefd[0], buf, 256);

    printf("Received answer: %s\n", buf);
  }

  kill(pid, SIGKILL); //send SIGKILL signal to the child process
  waitpid(pid, &status, 0);
}

The reason popen() and friends don't offer bidirectional communication is that it would be deadlock-prone, due to buffering in the subprocess. All the makeshift pipework and socketpair() solutions discussed in the answers suffer from the same problem.

Under UNIX, most commands cannot be trusted to read one line and immediately process it and print it, except if their standard output is a tty. The reason is that stdio buffers output in userspace by default, and defers the write() system call until either the buffer is full or the stdio stream is closed (typically because the program or script is about to exit after having seen EOF on input). If you write to such a program's stdin through a pipe, and now wait for an answer from that program's stdout (without closing the ingress pipe), the answer is stuck in the stdio buffers and will never come out - This is a deadlock.

You can trick some line-oriented programs (eg grep) into not buffering by using a pseudo-tty to talk to them; take a look at libexpect(3). But in the general case, you would have to re-run a different subprocess for each message, allowing to use EOF to signal the end of each message and cause whatever buffers in the command (or pipeline of commands) to be flushed. Obviously not a good thing performance-wise.

See more info about this problem in the perlipc man page (it's for bi-directional pipes in Perl but the buffering considerations apply regardless of the language used for the main program).

popen simultaneous read and write [duplicate]

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