I'm working on a C project for school that involves using shared memory but I can't seem to figure out why the parent process is printing the results twice after the fork. I flush the stdout after the print, but it still prints twice.
Heres my code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <sys/ipc.h>
#include <sys/shm.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <semaphore.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
/* Defining system macros to avoid magic numbers */
#define TRUE 1
#define FALSE 0
#define MEM_SIZE sizeof(collatz_data)
#define NAME "OS"
#define SEQ_SIZE 50
/* A data struct that will be put into the shared memory to store our values */
typedef struct {
int starting_number;
int sequence[SEQ_SIZE];
int seq_count;
int is_finished;
} collatz_data;
/* Function for calculating the collatz formula */
int calculate_collatz(int n) {
return (n % 2 == 0) ? (n / 2) : (3 * n + 1);
}
/* Shared memory passing project main run loop */
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int shm_fd;
pid_t pid;
collatz_data *shared_memory;
/* Requirement 1: Check to see if the number passed on the command line is positive */
if (argv[1] <= 0) {
printf("The number you entered was not positive.\n Exiting program...\n");
exit(1);
}
/* Getting the number from the command line using atoi function to turn character into int */
int number = atoi(argv[1]);
printf("\n");
/* Create the shared memeory segment & configure it's size*/
shm_fd = shm_open(NAME, O_CREAT | O_RDWR, 0666);
ftruncate(shm_fd, MEM_SIZE);
/* Map the shaerd memory segment to this address space */
shared_memory = mmap(0, MEM_SIZE, PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, shm_fd, 0);
/* Check to see that our shared memory segment was mapped correctly */
if (shared_memory == MAP_FAILED) {
printf("Map Failed\n");
return -1;
}
/* Fork the current process and create a child */
fflush(stdout);
pid = fork();
/* Check if the fork failed */
if ((pid=fork()) == -1) {
perror("Fork Failed");
/* Kill the program */
exit(1);
}
// Child
else if (pid == 0) {
int i = 0;
int n = shared_memory->starting_number;
/* Make the first number in the sequence the number from the command line */
shared_memory->sequence[i++] = n;
/* Calculate the collatz sequence by storing the numbers in our shared memory sequence */
while (n != 1 && i < SEQ_SIZE) {
n = calculate_collatz(n);
shared_memory->sequence[i++] = n; // Store the next number
}
/* Store the size of our sequence so the parent can loop over this number later to print it out*/
shared_memory->seq_count = i;
// Kill the child process
exit(0);
}
// Parent
else if (pid > 0) {
/* Requirement 2: Pass the input from the command line to the child process */
shared_memory->starting_number = number;
/* Requirement 4: Inoviking wait will the child calculates the sequence */
wait(NULL);
printf("Collatz Sequence for number (%d): \n", number);
/* Requirement 5: Print out collatz results generated by the child */
for (int i = 0; i < shared_memory->seq_count; i++) {
printf("%d ", shared_memory->sequence[i]);
}
printf("\n");
fflush(stdout);
exit(0);
}
/* Remove the shared memory object */
shm_unlink(NAME);
return 0;
}
The output should be:
Collatz Sequence for number (99): 99 298 149 448 224 112 56 28 14 7 22 11 34 17 52 26 13 40 20 10 5 16 8 4 2 1
But for some reason that entire thing gets printed twice. Any ideas of what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.