C - fork() and sharing memory

Question

I need my parent and child process to both be able to read and write the same variable (of type int) so it is \"global\" between the two processes.

I\'m assuming this wo

Answer 1

A variant that I used recently of shared memory is to open a mmap before forking. This avoids certain restrictions of the shared memory api. You don't have a size limit (the address range is limit), you don't need to generate the key from that absolute file. Here an example how I did it (I left out the error checking for the sake of brevity)

ppid = getpid();
shm_size  = ...;

char *tmpFile = tempnam(NULL, "SHM_");    /* Generate a temp file which is virtual */

/* Before we fork, build the communication memory maps */
mm = open(tmpFile, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0664));    /* Create the temp file */
ftruncate(mm, shm_size);                              /* Size the file to the needed size, on modern Unices it's */
                                                      /* a sparse file which doesn't allocate anything in the file system */

/* The exact type of comm_area left to the implementer */
comm_area *pCom = (comm_area *)mmap(NULL, shm_size, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, mm, 0);
if(pCom == (comm_area*)MAP_FAILED) handle_error();
close(mm);                                /* We can close the file, we won't access it via handle */
unlink(tmpFile);                          /* We can also remove the file so even if we crash we won't let corpses lying */
free(tmpFile);

/* Initialise some shared mutexes and semaphores */
pthread_mutexattr_t mattr;
pthread_mutexattr_init(&mattr);
pthread_mutexattr_setpshared(&mattr, PTHREAD_PROCESS_SHARED);
pthread_mutex_init(&pCom->stderr_mutex, &mattr);         

/* nSonAsked, global variable with the number of forked processes asked */
for(nSon=0; nSonsem_ch[nSon], USYNC_PROCESS, 0);
  if(fork() == 0 {
     ... /* do child stuff*/
     return;
  }
  /* Father, cleans up */
  pthread_mutexattr_destroy(&mattr);
  ...
  return;