ubuntu server pipeline stop process termination when the first exit - c++

Question

The situation is: I have an external application so I don't have the source code and i can't change it. While running, the application writes logs to the stderr. The task is to write a program that check the output of it and separate some part of the output to other file. My solution is to start the app like
./externalApp 2>&1 | myApp
the myApp is a c++ app with the following source:
using namespace std;
int main ()
{
string str;
ofstream A;
A.open("A.log");
ofstream B;
B.open("B.log");
A << "test start" << endl;
int i = 0;
while (getline(cin,str))
{
if(str.find("asdasd") != string::npos)
{
A << str << endl;
}
else
{
B << str << endl;
}
++i;
}
A << "test end: " << i << " lines" << endl;
A.close();
B.close();
return 0;
}
The externalApp can crash or be terminated. A that moment the myApp gets terminated too and it is don't write the last lines and don't close the files. The file can be 60Gb or larger so saving it and processing it after not a variant.
Correction: My problem is that when the externalApp crash it terminate myApp. That mean any code after while block will never run. So the question is: Is there a way to run myApp even after the externalApp closed?
How can I do this task correctly? I interesed in any other idea to do this task.

Answer 1

There's nothing wrong with the shown code, and nothing in your question offers any evidence of anything being wrong with the shown code. No evidence was shown that your logging application actually received "the last lines" to be written from that external application. Most likely that external application simply failed to write them to standard output or error, before crashing.
The most likely explanation is that your external application checks if its standard output or error is connected to an interactive terminal; if so each line of its log message is followed by an explicit buffer flush. When the external application's standard output is a pipe, no such flushing takes place, so the log messages get buffered up, and are flushed only when the application's internal output buffer is full. This is a fairly common behavior. But because of that, when the external application crashes its last logged lines are lost forever. Because your logger never received them. Your logger can't do anything about log lines it never read.
In your situation, the only available option is to set up and connect a pseudo-tty device to the external application's standard output and error, making it think that's connected to an interactive terminal, while its output is actually captured by your application.
You can't do this from the shell. You need to write some code to set this up. You can start by reading the pty(7) manual page which explains the procedure to follow, at which point you will end up with file descriptors that you can take, and attach to your external application.

Answer 2

If you want your program to cleanly deal with the external program crashing you will probably need to handle SIGPIPE. The default behaviour of this signal is to terminate the process.

Answer 3

So the problem was not that when the first element of the pipe ended it terminate the second. The real problem was that the two app with pipes launched from bash script and when the bash script ended it terminated all of it child process. I solved it using
signal(SIGHUP,SIG_IGN);
that way my app executed to the end.
Thank you for all the answer at least I learned lot about the signals and pipes.