Say I have an .exe, lets say sum.exe. Now say the code for sum.exe is
void main ()
{
int a,b;
scanf ("%d%d", &a, &b);
printf ("%d", a+b);
}
I wanted to know how I could run this program from another c/c++ program and pass input via stdin like they do in online compiler sites like ideone where I type the code in and provide the stdin data in a textbox and that data is accepted by the program using scanf or cin. Also, I wanted to know if there was any way to read the output of this program from the original program that started it.
The easiest way I know for doing this is by using the popen() function. It works in Windows and UNIX. On the other way, popen() only allows unidirectional communication.
For example, to pass information to sum.exe (although you won't be able to read back the result), you can do this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main()
{
FILE *f;
f = popen ("sum.exe", "w");
if (!f)
{
perror ("popen");
exit(1);
}
printf ("Sending 3 and 4 to sum.exe...\n");
fprintf (f, "%d\n%d\n", 3, 4);
pclose (f);
return 0;
}
In C on platforms whose name end with X (i.e. not Windows), the key components are:
pipe - Returns a pair of file descriptors, so that what's written to one can be read from the other.
fork - Forks the process to two, both keep running the same code.
dup2 - Renumbers file descriptors. With this, you can take one end of a pipe and turn it into stdin or stdout.
exec - Stop running the current program, start running another, in the same process.
Combine them all, and you can get what you asked for.
This is my solution and it worked:
sum.cpp
#include "stdio.h"
int main (){
int a,b;
scanf ("%d%d", &a, &b);
printf ("%d", a+b);
return 0;
}
test.cpp
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(){
system("./sum.exe < data.txt");
return 0;
}
data.txt
3 4
Try this solution :)
How to do so is platform dependent.
Under windows, Use CreatePipe and CreateProcess. You can find example from MSDN :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682499(v=vs.85).aspx
Under Linux/Unix, you can use dup() / dup2()
One simple way to do so is to use a Terminal (like command prompt in windows) and use | to redirect input/output.
Example:
program1 | program2
This will redirect program1's output to program2's input.
To retrieve/input date, you can use temporary files, If you don't want to use temporary files, you will have to use pipe.
For Windows, (use command prompt):
program1 <input >output
For Linux, you can use tee utility, you can find detail instruction by typing man tee in linux terminal
It sounds like you're coming from a Windows environment, so this might not be the answer you are looking for, but from the command line you can use the pipe redirection operator '|' to redirect the stdout of one program to the stdin of another. http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/redirection.mspx?mfr=true
You're probably better off working in a bash shell, which you can get on Windows with cygwin http://cygwin.com/
Also, your example looks like a mix of C++ and C, and the declaration of main isn't exactly an accepted standard for either.
How to do this (you have to check for errors ie. pipe()==-1, dup()!=0, etc, I'm not doing this in the following snippet).
This code runs your program "sum", writes "2 3" to it, and than reads sum's output. Next, it writes the output on the stdout.
#include <iostream>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main() {
int parent_to_child[2], child_to_parent[2];
pipe(parent_to_child);
pipe(child_to_parent);
char name[] = "sum";
char *args[] = {name, NULL};
switch (fork()) {
case 0:
// replace stdin with reading from parent
close(fileno(stdin));
dup(parent_to_child[0]);
close(parent_to_child[0]);
// replace stdout with writing to parent
close(fileno(stdout));
dup(child_to_parent[1]);
close(child_to_parent[1]);
close(parent_to_child[1]); // dont write on this pipe
close(child_to_parent[0]); // dont read from this pipe
execvp("./sum", args);
break;
default:
char msg[] = "2 3\n";
close(parent_to_child[0]); // dont read from this pipe
close(child_to_parent[1]); // dont write on this pipe
write(parent_to_child[1], msg, sizeof(msg));
close(parent_to_child[1]);
char res[64];
wait(0);
read(child_to_parent[0], res, 64);
printf("%s", res);
exit(0);
}
}
I'm doing what #ugoren suggested in their answer:
Create two pipes for communication between processes
Fork
Replace stdin, and stdout with pipes' ends using dup
Send the data through the pipe
Based on a few answers posted above and various tutorials/manuals, I just did this in Linux using pipe() and shell redirection. The strategy is to first create a pipe, call another program and redirect the output of the callee from stdout to one end of the pipe, and then read the other end of the pipe. As long as the callee writes to stdout there's no need to modify it.
In my application, I needed to read a math expression input from the user, call a standalone calculator and retrieve its answer. Here's my simplified solution to demonstrate the redirection:
#include <string>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sstream>
#include <iostream>
// this function is used to wait on the pipe input and clear input buffer after each read
std::string pipeRead(int fd) {
char data[100];
ssize_t size = 0;
while (size == 0) {
size = read(fd, data, 100);
}
std::string ret = data;
return ret;
}
int main() {
// create pipe
int calculatorPipe[2];
if(pipe(calculatorPipe) < 0) {
exit(1);
}
std::string answer = "";
std::stringstream call;
// redirect calculator's output from stdout to one end of the pipe and execute
// e.g. ./myCalculator 1+1 >&8
call << "./myCalculator 1+1 >&" << calculatorPipe[1];
system(call.str().c_str());
// now read the other end of the pipe
answer = pipeRead(calculatorPipe[0]);
std::cout << "pipe data " << answer << "\n";
return 0;
}
Obviously there are other solutions out there but this is what I can think of without modifying the callee program. Things might be different in Windows though.
Some useful links:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/pipe-system-call/
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Redirections.html
In my code, I use popen with cmd 'iostat -xk 2 2'. Generally the iostat cmd will output a report to stdout and sleep for interval 2 seconds, then output another report to stdout.
When I use fgets to read from popen pipe, weird things are: I only get the first report. fgets hangs there and I never get the second report 2 seconds later. I change the function fgets to fgetc but it didn't help.
Here is my C++ code:
string iostatCMD = string("iostat -xk 2 2 ");
FILE *iostatFile = popen(iostatCMD.c_str(), "r");
int fd = fileno(iostatFile);
string readall;
while(!feof(iostatFile))
{
char buffer[128];
if (fgets(buffer, 128, iostatFile) != NULL)
{
cout <<buffer;
readall += buffer;
}
}
cout <<"readall = " <<readall <<endl;
I give it a try with Python. It works very well with popen, I get two reports by iostat and no hangs:
subprocess.Popen('iostat -xk 2 2', shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0];
So my question is how to read continuely all the output from popen pipe in C++?
I try to redirect output in my c++ program from stdout with the following:
freopen(cmd.c_str(),"w",stdout);
Then I call system to execute cmd. I have also tried forking and then calling execvp. Either way, when program control returns to my program, things written to stdout are no longer showing. How can normal behavior be restored?
Here is solution for stdin if doing in loop, needed to figure this out for a program wherein freopen of stdin happens in a loop on some condition. Took some time for me to figure out (with help of search and all) and so posting here
savestdin = dup(STDIN_FILENO);
while (1) {
.
.
if (inputfile) {
savestdin = dup(savestdin);
freopen(inputfile, "r", stdin);
restorestdin = TRUE;
}
.
.
if (restorestdin) {
fflush(stdin);
fclose(stdin);
stdin = fdopen(savestdin, "r");
restorestdin = FALSE;
}
.
.
}
Do this:
fclose(stdout);
stdout = fdopen(1, "w"); //reopen: 1 is file descriptor of std output
If you can use STDOUT_FILENO from <unistd.h>, instead of 1 as first argument to fdopen.
I got some problems with EOF and stdio in a communication pipeline between a python process and a C++ program. I have no idea what I am doing wrong. When I see an EOF in my program I clear the stdin and next round I try to read in a new line. The problem is: for some reason the getline function immediatly (from the second run always, the first works just as intended) returns an EOF instead of waiting for a new input from the python process... Any idea?
alright Here is the code:
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
#include <limits>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
for (;;) {
string buf;
if (getline(cin,buf)) {
if (buf=="q") break;
/*****///do some stuff with input //my actual filter program
cout<<buf;
/*****/
} else {
if ((cin.rdstate() & istream::eofbit)!=0)cout<<"eofbit"<<endl;
if ((cin.rdstate() & istream::failbit)!=0)cout<<"failbit"<<endl;
if ((cin.rdstate() & istream::badbit)!=0)cout<<"badbit"<<endl;
if ((cin.rdstate() & istream::goodbit)!=0)cout<<"goodbit"<<endl;
cin.clear();
cin.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max());
//break;//I am not using break, because I
//want more input when the parent
//process puts data into stdin;
}
}
return 0;
}
and in python:
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import os
from time import sleep
proc=Popen(os.getcwd()+"/Pipingtest",stdout=PIPE,stdin=PIPE,stderr=PIPE);
while(1):
sleep(0.5)
print proc.communicate("1 1 1")
print "running"
communicate in python is a one shot function. It sends the given input to a process, closes the input stream, and reads the output streams, waiting for the process to terminate.
There is no way you can 'restart' the pipe with the same process after "communicating".
Conversely, on the other side of the pipe, when you read EOF there is no more data to read. Any attempt to read will immediately return EOF; python has closed the pipe.
If you want to carry on communicating with the same pipe you need to use the subprocess' stdin and stdout members and not communicate (but be careful of the potential of deadlocks) and use something other than the end of stream to signal that the C++ side should do another "batch" of processing.
Is that even possible ?
Lets say that the code has a lot of scanf lines. Instead of manually running and adding values by hand when debugging, is it possible to "feed" stdin with data so that when the scanf starts reading, it will read the inputted data without any need to interact with the terminal.
Put the test lines into a file, and run the program like this:
myprogram < mytestlines.txt
Better than hacking your program to somehow do that itself.
When you're debugging the code, you can set up the debugger to run it with that command line.
To make your program a little more versatile, you might want to consider rewriting your program to use fscanf, fprintf, etc. so that it can already handle file IO as opposed to just console IO; then when you want to read from stdin or write to stdout, you would just do something along the lines of:
FILE *infile, *outfile;
if (use_console) {
infile = stdin;
outfile = stdout;
} else {
infile = fopen("intest.txt", "r");
outfile = fopen("output.txt", "w");
}
fscanf(infile, "%d", &x);
fprintf(outfile, "2*x is %d", 2*x);
Because how often do programs only handle stdin/stdout and not allow files? Especially if you end up using your program in shell scripts, it can be more explicit to specify input and outputs on the command line.
int fd[2];
pipe(fd);
close(0); // 0:stdin
dup(fd[0], 0); // make read pipe be stdin
close(fd[0]);
fd[0] = 0;
write(fd[1], "some text", 9); // write "some text" to stdin