fork and pipe problem

[Alex Pollard]

Hi,

I'm debugging some software on two machines. One is an athlon 686 RedHat 8.0
 with kernel 2.4.18-14, the other a pentium with RedHat 7.1 and kernel
 2.4.9-31

The code works fine on the athlon without the fcntl(), but it is required for 
the pentium.

  if (!(childPid = fork())) {
    // close stdout and dup the writing end of the pipe
    if (dup2(childToParentPipe[1],STDOUT_FILENO)==-1) {
      fprintf(stderr, "Failed to dup2 in proc = %d\n",(int)getpid());
    }
    //fcntl(STDOUT_FILENO, F_SETFD,FD_CLOEXEC);

   // close unused end of pipe

    ::_close(childToParentPipe[0]);

    fprintf(stderr,"execing on ");
    fprintf(stderr,"%s -p %s -r %s \n",command,portString,theDirector.url()
 );
    if (execl(command,command,"-p",portString,"-r",theDirector.url(),NULL)<0)
 { fprintf(stderr,"exec on %s -p %s -r %s failed with error
 %d\n",command,portString,theDirector.url(),errno ); delete this;
	exit(-4);
    }

  }

Without the fcntl() on the athlon the child process's output to STDOUT is 
received at the parent's end of the pipe. Without the fcntl() on the pentium, 
the child process's output appears in the terminal, but there is no error 
reported for the dup2() or anything else.

But the problem with including fcntl() in either version is that the parent 
never receives notification of data put into the pipe via a select call.

I've found that 

fcntl(STDOUT_FILENO, F_SETFD,0);

is equivalent to not using fcntl() at all.


Is there some difference between how these kernels handle fork() and execl()?

Also, is it OK for multiple child processes to use the same pipe to send data
 to their common parent? Or should there be a new pipe for each child? I'm 
ignoring the problem of zombie children for the moment.

Alex