Solved–Lab 8: –pipe, exec, dup2– Solution

Description

Introduction

In an application that requires a user to login, the application must be able to read in a user id and password, and validate it to determine whether the login is successful. One approach to validation is to hand the task off to a separate process.

In this lab, you are given a program that validates user id and passwords, and will apply what you’ve learned about processes and pipes to create a program that runs this validation program in a child process and reports the result of the validation.

1. Understanding the validate program

You can find the code for the validation program used for this lab in validate.c . The validate program reads the user id and password from stdin , because if they were given as command-line arguments they would be visible to programs such as ps that inspect the state of the system. You are also given a sample file containing user ids and password combinations, which is used by validate .

After reading the comments at the top of validate.c , you will want to compile it and try running validate directly first.

How many bytes does validate expect to read in each read call? Does it require the input to be null-terminated? What happens in each case?

Notice that this program doesn’t print any output; the only information it provides comes in the exit code of the program.

Use the shell variable $? to refer to the exit code of the last process run (e.g., by running echo $? ).

NOTE: You may not change the validate program.

2. Create the main program

Your task is to complete checkpasswd.c , which reads a user id and password from stdin , creates a new process to run the validate program, sends it the user id and password, and prints a message to stdout reporting whether the validation is successful.

Your program should use the exit status of the validate program to determine which of the three following messages to print:

“Password verified” if the user id and password match.

“Invalid password” if the user id exists, but the password does not match.

“No such user” if the user id is not recognized

The exact messages are given in the starter code as defined constants.

Note that in the given password file pass.txt , the “killerwhales:swim” has a userid that is too large, and “monkeys:eatcoconuts” has a password that is too long. The examples are expected to fail, but the other cases should work correctly.

You will find the following system calls useful: fork , exec , pipe , dup2 , write , wait (along with WIFEXITED , WEXITSTATUS ). You may not use popen or pclose in your solution.

Important: execl arguments

Week 7 Video 6 “Running Different Programs” demonstrates a version of execl that takes only two arguments. The signature for execl is:

int execl(const char *path, const char *arg0, … /*, (char *)NULL */);

https://q.utoronto.ca/courses/130688/assignments/243365 1/2
4/15/2020 Lab 8

In the video, the execl call only passed two arguments ( execl(“./hello”, NULL) ), but that shortcut doesn’t work on teach.cs. Instead, you need to pass the middle argument (respresenting argv[0] ) explicitly: execl(“./hello”, “hello”, NULL) .

Let’s consider two more examples. If you want to call the executable ./giant with the arguments fee fi fo , you would do it like this:

execl(“./giant”, “giant”, “fee”, “fi”, “fo”, NULL); If you want to call ./giant with no arguments you would call it like this:

Submit your final checkpasswd.c file to MarkUs under the lab8 folder in your repository.

https://q.utoronto.ca/courses/130688/assignments/243365 2/2