PCLOSE(3P)						     POSIX Programmer's Manual							PCLOSE(3P)

PROLOG

       This  manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The Linux implementation of this interface may differ (consult the correspond-
       ing Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

NAME

       pclose - close a pipe stream to or from a process

SYNOPSIS

       #include <stdio.h>

       int pclose(FILE *stream);

DESCRIPTION

       The pclose() function shall close a stream that was opened by popen(), wait for the command to terminate, and return the termination status
       of  the	process  that was running the command language interpreter.  However, if a call caused the termination status to be unavailable to
       pclose(), then pclose() shall return -1 with errno set to [ECHILD] to report this situation. This can happen if the application	calls  one
       of the following functions:

	* wait()

	* waitpid() with a pid argument less than or equal to 0 or equal to the process ID of the command line interpreter

	* Any other function not defined in this volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 that could do one of the above

       In any case, pclose() shall not return before the child process created by popen() has terminated.

       If  the	command language interpreter cannot be executed, the child termination status returned by pclose() shall be as if the command lan-
       guage interpreter terminated using exit(127) or _exit(127).

       The pclose() function shall not affect the termination status of any child of the calling process other than the one created by popen() for
       the associated stream.

       If the argument stream to pclose() is not a pointer to a stream created by popen(), the result of pclose() is undefined.

RETURN VALUE

       Upon  successful return, pclose() shall return the termination status of the command language interpreter. Otherwise, pclose() shall return
       -1 and set errno to indicate the error.

ERRORS

       The pclose() function shall fail if:

       ECHILD The status of the child process could not be obtained, as described above.

       The following sections are informative.

EXAMPLES

       None.

APPLICATION USAGE

       None.

RATIONALE

       There is a requirement that pclose() not return before the child process terminates. This is  intended  to  disallow  implementations  that
       return  [EINTR]	if  a  signal  is  received while waiting. If pclose() returned before the child terminated, there would be no way for the
       application to discover which child used to be associated with the stream, and it could not do the cleanup itself.

       If the stream pointed to by stream was not created by popen(), historical implementations of pclose() return -1 without setting errno.	To
       avoid  requiring  pclose()  to  set errno in this case, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 makes the behavior unspecified.  An application should not use
       pclose() to close any stream that was not created by popen().

       Some historical implementations of pclose() either block or ignore the signals SIGINT, SIGQUIT, and SIGHUP  while  waiting  for	the  child
       process	to terminate. Since this behavior is not described for the pclose() function in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, such implementations are not
       conforming. Also, some historical implementations return [EINTR] if a signal is received, even though the child process has not terminated.
       Such implementations are also considered non-conforming.

       Consider, for example, an application that uses:

	      popen("command", "r")

       to  start  command,  which is part of the same application. The parent writes a prompt to its standard output (presumably the terminal) and
       then reads from the popen()ed stream. The child reads the response from the user, does some transformation on the response (pathname expan-
       sion,  perhaps)	and  writes the result to its standard output.	The parent process reads the result from the pipe, does something with it,
       and prints another prompt. The cycle repeats. Assuming that both processes do appropriate buffer flushing, this would be expected to work.

       To conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, pclose() must use waitpid(), or some similar function, instead of wait().

       The code sample below illustrates how the pclose() function might be implemented on a system conforming to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001.

	      int pclose(FILE *stream)
	      {
		  int stat;
		  pid_t pid;

		  pid = <pid for process created for stream by popen()>
		  (void) fclose(stream);
		  while (waitpid(pid, &stat, 0) == -1) {
		      if (errno != EINTR){
			  stat = -1;
			  break;
		      }
		  }
		  return(stat);
	      }

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

       None.

SEE ALSO

       fork(), popen(), waitpid(), the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, <stdio.h>

COPYRIGHT

       Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2003 Edition, Standard for Information Technol-
       ogy -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, Copyright (C) 2001-2003 by the Institute of
       Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and  the  original  IEEE
       and  The  Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained
       online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

IEEE
/The Open Group						       2003								PCLOSE(3P)