How to properly wait for foreground/background processes in my own shell in C?

Question

In this previous question I posted most of my own shell code. My next step is to implement foreground and background process execution and properly wait for them to terminate so

Answer 1

You may use:

if(!background)
    pause();

This way, the process blocks until it receives the SIGCHLD signal, and the signal handler will do the wait stuff.

Answer 2

There are various options to waitpid() to help you (quotes from the POSIX standard):

WCONTINUED

The waitpid() function shall report the status of any continued child process specified by pid whose status has not been reported since it continued from a job control stop.

WNOHANG

The waitpid() function shall not suspend execution of the calling thread if status is not immediately available for one of the child processes specified by pid.

In particular, WNOHANG will allow you to see whether there are any corpses to collect without causing your process to block waiting for a corpse.

If the calling process has SA_NOCLDWAIT set or has SIGCHLD set to SIG_IGN, and the process has no unwaited-for children that were transformed into zombie processes, the calling thread shall block until all of the children of the process containing the calling thread terminate, and wait() and waitpid() shall fail and set errno to [ECHILD].

You probably don't want to be ignoring SIGCHLD, etc, and your signal handler should probably be setting a flag to tell your main loop "Oops; there's dead child - go collect that corpse!".

The SIGCONT and SIGSTOP signals will also be of relevance to you - they are used to restart and stop a child process, respectively (in this context, at any rate).

I'd recommend looking at Rochkind's book or Stevens' book - they cover these issues in detail.

Answer 3

Instead of using a global variable, I thought of a different solution:

if(!background) {
    signal(SIGCHLD, NULL);

    waitpid(pid, NULL, 0);

    signal(SIGCHLD, childSignalHandler);
}

If I'm running a foreground process "delete" the handler for SIGCHLD so it doesn't get called. Then, after waitpid(), set the handler again. This way, only the background processes will be handled.

Do you think there's anything wrong with this solution?

Answer 4

This should get you started. The major difference is that I got rid of the child handler and added waitpid in the main loop with some feedback. Tested and working, but obviously needs more TLC.

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

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        char bBuffer[BUFSIZ], *pArgs[10], *aPtr = NULL, *sPtr;
        int background;
        ssize_t rBytes;
        int aCount;
        pid_t pid;
        int status;
        while(1) {
                pid = waitpid(-1, &status, WNOHANG);
                if (pid > 0)
                        printf("waitpid reaped child pid %d\n", pid);
                write(1, "\e[1;31mmyBash \e[1;32m# \e[0m", 27);
                rBytes = read(0, bBuffer, BUFSIZ-1);
                if(rBytes == -1) {
                        perror("read");
                        exit(1);
                }
                bBuffer[rBytes-1] = '\0';
                if(!strcasecmp(bBuffer, "exit")) 
                        exit(0);
                sPtr = bBuffer;
                aCount = 0;
                do {
                        aPtr = strsep(&sPtr, " ");
                        pArgs[aCount++] = aPtr;
                } while(aPtr);
                background = (strcmp(pArgs[aCount-2], "&") == 0);
                if (background)
                        pArgs[aCount-2] = NULL;
                if (strlen(pArgs[0]) > 1) {
                        pid = fork();
                        if (pid == -1) {
                                perror("fork");
                                exit(1);
                        } else if (pid == 0) {
                                execvp(pArgs[0], pArgs);
                                exit(1);
                        } else if (!background) {
                                pid = waitpid(pid, &status, 0);
                                if (pid > 0)
                                        printf("waitpid reaped child pid %d\n", pid);
                        }
                }
        }
        return 0;
}

EDIT: Adding back in signal handling isn't difficult with waitpid() using WNOHANG. It's as simple as moving the waitpid() stuff from the top of the loop into the signal handler. You should be aware of two things, though:

First, even "foreground" processes will send SIGCHLD. Since there can be only one foreground process you can simply store the foreground pid (parent's return value from fork()) in a variable visible to the signal handler if you want to do special handling of foreground vs. background.

Second, you're currently doing blocking I/O on standard input (the read() at main loop top). You are extremely likely to be blocked on read() when SIGCHLD occurs, resulting in an interrupted system call. Depending on OS it may restart the system call automatically, or it may send a signal that you must handle.