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Full Discussion: fork() problem
Top Forums Programming fork() problem Post 302107294 by matrixmadhan on Thursday 15th of February 2007 11:30:23 PM
Old 02-16-2007
Got it! Smilie

Once a new process is forked unless and untill parent / child synchronization is implemented in the code, there is no way to determine with the logic of code which would run first.

In the code that is being discussed, there is no such parent / child synchronization mechanism hence it is purely the discretion of the kernel to decide which one to run first ( had vfork been used, child is guaranteed to run first), though in most of the cases child runs first before the parent is executed.
Moreover the child and parent are using the common file pointer and before the parent could read the contents of the file child reads and moves the file pointer to read EOF. Thats why there is no file content being displayed on behalf of the parent process.

That could be checked as follows in a simple way,

In the parent modify the parent fscanf - code to print the return value, in most of the cases it would return -1 indicating before parent could start child had completed the processing and hence a '-1' being returned to that.

Code:
printf("the return value for parent is %d\n", fscanf(fileptr1,"%s",temp2));

To specifically make a parent to read and child to wait before it could start, here is a weak way of doing it Smilie

in child code

Code:
sleep(10);

(or)

have the file being read as a real huge file, then by default time slicing chances are there that parent gets a chance to read from the file before it encounters EOF

(Hope so, the sample file you had used is relatively small)

Smilie Smilie
 

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FORK(2) 						      BSD System Calls Manual							   FORK(2)

NAME
fork -- create a new process SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h> #include <unistd.h> pid_t fork(void); DESCRIPTION
Fork() causes creation of a new process. The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process (parent process) except for the following: o The child process has a unique process ID. o The child process has a different parent process ID (i.e., the process ID of the parent process). o The child process has its own copy of the parent's descriptors. These descriptors reference the same underlying objects, so that, for instance, file pointers in file objects are shared between the child and the parent, so that an lseek(2) on a descriptor in the child process can affect a subsequent read or write by the parent. This descriptor copying is also used by the shell to establish standard input and output for newly created processes as well as to set up pipes. o The child processes resource utilizations are set to 0; see setrlimit(2). RETURN VALUES
Upon successful completion, fork() returns a value of 0 to the child process and returns the process ID of the child process to the parent process. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned to the parent process, no child process is created, and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error. ERRORS
Fork() will fail and no child process will be created if: [EAGAIN] The system-imposed limit on the total number of processes under execution would be exceeded. This limit is configuration- dependent. [EAGAIN] The system-imposed limit MAXUPRC (<sys/param.h>) on the total number of processes under execution by a single user would be exceeded. [ENOMEM] There is insufficient swap space for the new process. SEE ALSO
execve(2), wait(2) HISTORY
A fork() function call appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. 4th Berkeley Distribution June 4, 1993 4th Berkeley Distribution
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