Parent process doesn't complete after child is terminated in C

Question

I'm having trouble with a process forking exercise. I want to fork a child process and have it hang after announcing it has been forked, and wait for a signal to terminate, after which the parent process must announce it is terminating and then exit.

I can get the processes forked and have the parent wait for the hanging child to be killed by the signal, but it seems to kill the parent as well. I tried killing the child process specifically by its PID, but with no success.

Thanks for any help!

Code:

#include  <stdio.h>
#include  <signal.h>
#include  <unistd.h>
#include  <stdlib.h>
#include  <sys/wait.h>
#include  <sys/types.h>


void catchInt (int signum)
{
    printf("\nMy  sincerest apologies, master\n");
    /*kill(0, SIGINT);*/
    exit(0);
}

void ignoreInt (int signum)
{
    wait(NULL);
}

int main () {

    pid_t  pid;

    /* fork process */
    pid = fork();
    if (pid < 0) /* error handler */ 
    {      
        fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed");
        exit(-1);
    }

    else if (pid == 0) /* child */    
    { 
        printf("Child reporting in\n");
        signal(SIGINT, catchInt);
        for ( ;; )
            pause();
    }

    else /* parent */
    {
        /* parent will wait for the child to complete */
        signal(SIGINT, ignoreInt);
        wait(NULL);
        printf("You're welcome\n");
        exit(0);
    }

}

The code you show doesn't compile - you've not defined tempPID. You don't need <unistd.h> twice, and these days you don't need <sys/types.h> (though in some earlier versions of POSIX, it was needed). — Jonathan Leffler
This doesn't compile, and it doesn't make much sense even if it did. tempPID is completely undeclared, and is read in the signal handler that is only used in the parent process, despite the fact that it is only set in the child process. At least fix that, and we'll see where we can get you from there. — Tim Yates

Jonathan Leffler Jonathan Leffler · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-18T20:27:10

Even assuming you fix the code so it compiles (you've not defined tempPID), there are problems:

You set the child to go to sleep until a signal arrives.
You set the parent to wait until the child dies.

So, you have a state where neither process is going to do anything more.

You probably need the parent to send a signal to the child:

kill(pid, SIGINT);

It is not clear that you need the parent to set a signal handler.
You probably want the child to set a signal handler.
You probably don't want the infinite loop in the child.
Oh, and void main() is incorrect - int main() or int main(void) or int main(int argc, char **argv) are the approved declarations for main().
And it is tidier if you return a value (0) from main(). The C99 standard does permit you to drop off the end of main() and will treat that as returning zero, but only if the function is properly declared as returning an int.
The header for wait() and relatives in POSIX is <sys/wait.h>.

And, because I'm a sucker, here's code that compiles and might even do what you want:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <unistd.h>            /* getpid() */ 
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>

void catchInt(int signum)
{
    printf("Child's PID is %d\n", (int)getpid());
    printf("My sincerest apologies, master\n");
    exit(1);
}

int main()
{
    pid_t  pid = fork();
    if (pid < 0) /* error handler */ 
    {      
        fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed");
        exit(-1);
    }
    else if (pid == 0) /* child */    
    { 
        printf("Child reporting in\n");
        signal(SIGINT, catchInt);
        pause();
    }    
    else /* parent */
    {
        sleep(1);
        kill(pid, SIGINT);
        wait(NULL);
        printf("You're welcome\n");
    }
    return(0);
}

Parent process doesn't complete after child is terminated in C

2 Answers