Pipe Unix commands together with C

Question

I want to simulate this Unix command :

cat file.txt | sort | tail -4

I followed the technique, but it does not work, it remains blocked. Maybe i need to use something else when there are files. I used two pipes, and two processes and i used two DUP in a single process, maybe that's wrong.

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

int main()
{
  int p1[2];
  int p2[2];

  if(pipe(p1))
  {
    perror("pipe1");
    exit(0);
  }

  if(pipe(p2))
  {
    perror("pipe2");
    exit(0);
  }

  switch(fork())
  {
    case -1: perror(" fork1 error ");
             exit(0);

    case  0: close(STDOUT_FILENO);
             (void)dup(p1[1]);
             close(p1[1]);
             close(p1[0]);
             execlp("cat", "cat", "file.txt", NULL);
             exit(0);
    default: 
            switch(fork())
            {
              case -1: perror(" fork2 error ");
               exit(0);

              case  0: close(STDIN_FILENO);
                       (void)dup(p1[0]);
                       close(p1[1]);
                       close(p1[0]);

                       close(STDOUT_FILENO);
                       (void)dup(p2[1]);
                       close(p2[1]);
                       close(p2[0]);

                       execlp("sort", "sort", NULL);
                       exit(0);

              default: 
                       wait(NULL);
                       close(STDIN_FILENO);
                       (void)dup(p2[0]);
                       close(p2[0]);
                       close(p2[1]);
                       execlp("tail", "tail", "-4", NULL); 
            }             
  }
}

this is the file.txt :

g
f
d
b
c
a
e

Answer 1

The parent process never closes the pipe p1 so its child keep trying to read on it. Add close(p1[0]); close(p1[1]); close(p1[0]); close(p1[1]); before the execlp("tail", "tail", "-4", NULL); .

Also note that you should not wait(NULL) : this is another hang waiting to happen when file.txt is big and starts to fill the pipe buffer.