Re: Socket inheritance with fork/dup2/exec

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Jun 21 22:45, Jim Powers wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am redirecting the stdout of a child process to a socket via the standard 
> fork/dup2/exec paradigm and then reading and displaying the output.
> 
> This works fine if the exec'd child process is compiled using gcc under 
> cygwin. However, it fails with an "Invalid file handle" error when compiled 
> using VC8 under windows.
> 
> I've included both the parent and child code below.
> 
> I am running cygwin 1.5.24 and gcc3.4.4.

This is almost certainly a drawback of the method used for duplicating
sockets to child processes used in Cygwin 1.5.24 and before
(WSADuplicateSocket/WSASocket).  This only works reliable if the child
knows that the descriptor is a socket.  Usually server applications
using sockets don't duplicate the socket to the child processes, but
instead use pipes or pseudo terminals on the local connection, so that's
not a standard problem.

However, the next version of Cygwin will use standard DuplicateHandle
calls as for normal file handles.  Consequentially your
your test application appears to work with a Cygwin built from CVS:

  $ ./sock-cyg-win-parent ./sock-cyg-win-child.exe
  hellohellohellohellohello^C

You could try a developer snapshot from http://cygwin.com/snapshots/

As a workaround for Cygwin 1.5.x, use pipes, as already noted, or pseudo
terminals.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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