I have a program which needs to launch other programs, possibly substituting their stdio with files and pipes. While it appears to "work" in that the sub-process does get it's I/O from the source pipe, unfortunately, it also causes a hang. The sub-process is seemingly never getting an EOF.
Here is a minimal reproduction of the code, why does this hang after printing "Hello World\n"?
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
switch (pid_t pid = fork()) {
case 0: {
// in child
// replace the child's stdin with whatever filename is given as argv[1]
freopen(argv[1], "r+b", stdin);
// construct an argv array for to exec, no need for anything except
// argv[0] since we want it to use stdin
char path[] = "/bin/cat";
char *args[] = {path, NULL};
// run it!
execv(args[0], args);
abort(); // we should never get here!
}
case -1:
// error
return -1;
default: {
// in parent, just wait for the sub-process to terminate
int status;
const auto r = waitpid(pid, &status, __WALL);
if (r == -1) {
perror("waitpid");
return -1;
}
break;
}
}
}
# runs printf creating a pipe, which is then passed as the argv of my test program
./test >(printf "Hello\n")