pidof from a background script for another background process - c++

Question

I wrote a c++ program to check if a process is running or not . this process is independently launched at background . my program works fine when I run it on foreground but when I time schedule it, it do not work .
int PID= ReadCommanOutput("pidof /root/test/testProg1"); /// also tested with pidof -m
I made a script in /etc/cron.d/myscript to time schedule it as follows :-
45 15 * * * root /root/ProgramMonitor/./testBkg > /root/ProgramMonitor/OutPut.txt
what could be the reason for this ?
string ReadCommanOutput(string command)
{
string output="";
int its=system((command+" > /root/ProgramMonitor/macinfo.txt").c_str());
if(its==0)
{
ifstream reader1("/root/ProgramMonitor/macinfo.txt",fstream::in);
if(!reader1.fail())
{
while(!reader1.eof())
{
string line;
getline(reader1,line);
if(reader1.fail())// for last read
break;
if(!line.empty())
{
stringstream ss(line.c_str());
ss>>output;
cout<<command<<" output = ["<<output<<"]"<<endl;
break;
}
}
reader1.close();
remove("/root/ProgramMonitor/macinfo.txt");
}
else
cout<<"/root/ProgramMonitor/macinfo.txt not found !"<<endl;
}
else
cout<<"ERROR: code = "<<its<<endl;
return output;
}
its output coming as "ERROR: code = 256"
thanks in advacee .

Answer 1

If you really wanted to pipe(2), fork(2), execve(2) then read the output of a pidof command, you should at least use popen(3) since ReadCommandOutput is not in the Posix API; at the very least
pid_t thepid = 0;
FILE* fpidof = popen("pidof /root/test/testProg1");
if (fpidof) {
int p=0;
if (fscanf(fpidof, "%d", &p)>0 && p>0)
thepid = (pid_t)p;
pclose(fpidof);
}
BTW, you did not specify what should happen if several processes (or none) are running the testProg1....; you also need to check the result of pclose
But you don't need to; actually you'll want to build, perhaps using snprintf, the pidof command (and you should be scared of code injection into that command, so quote arguments appropriately). You could simply find your command by accessing the proc(5) file system: you would opendir(3) on "/proc/", then loop on readdir(3) and for every entry which has a numerical name like 1234 (starts with a digit) readlink(2) its exe entry like e.g. /proc/1234/exe ...). Don't forget the closedir and test every syscall.
Please read Advanced Linux Programming
Notice that libraries like Poco or toolkits like Qt (which has a layer QCore without any GUI, and providing QProcess ....) could be useful to you.
As to why your pidof is failing, we can't guess (perhaps a permission issue, or perhaps there is no more any process like you want). Try to run it as root in another terminal at least. Test its exit code, and display both its stdout & stderr at least for debugging purposes.
Also, a better way (assuming that testProg1 is some kind of a server application, to be run in at most one single process) might be to define different conventions. Your testProg1 might start by writing its own pid into /var/run/testProg1.pid and your current application might then read the pid from that file and check, with kill(2) and a 0 signal number, that the process is still existing.
BTW, you could also improve your crontab(5) entry. You could make it run some shell script which uses logger(1) and (for debugging) runs pidof with its output redirected elsewhere. You might also read the mail perhaps sent to root by cron.

Answer 2

Finally I solved this problem by using su command
I have used
ReadCommanOutput("su -c 'pidof /root/test/testProg1' - root");
insteadof
ReadCommanOutput("pidof /root/test/testProg1");