Tim_Heldberg
asked on
Problem checking stdin for input...ipc
Hello,
I am working on a program ins which I have a server that is communicating with clients using the message queue system. The problem is that after the message queue is set up, the client and server go into a loop where the client loop first check whether there are any messages for it in the queue(no problem) then it checks whether there is a command entered to it from the console.
The problem is, I can not figure out any way to check stdin for any input, and if there is none to go on.
Help would be very appreciated..
I am working on a program ins which I have a server that is communicating with clients using the message queue system. The problem is that after the message queue is set up, the client and server go into a loop where the client loop first check whether there are any messages for it in the queue(no problem) then it checks whether there is a command entered to it from the console.
The problem is, I can not figure out any way to check stdin for any input, and if there is none to go on.
Help would be very appreciated..
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The common shells do not directly support multithreading or asynchronous I/O.
What shell programming languages are great at is managing multiple processes.
Your shell script should spawn a separate process to manage the message queue,
while the original script waits for input on stdin. That separate process could
simply be another shell script running in a subhell.
What shell programming languages are great at is managing multiple processes.
Your shell script should spawn a separate process to manage the message queue,
while the original script waits for input on stdin. That separate process could
simply be another shell script running in a subhell.
Hi Tim_Heldberg,
> Im using a unix shell
You need non-blocking I/O for this; check the fcntl call with the O_NONBLOCK option. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in the shell, you need a C program (or something similar) for this.
Cheers!
Stefan
> Im using a unix shell
You need non-blocking I/O for this; check the fcntl call with the O_NONBLOCK option. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in the shell, you need a C program (or something similar) for this.
Cheers!
Stefan
Nonblocking IO will work for most things here, although I, personally, have managed to get stdin to behave properly without blocking. What I have found works very well as a replacement is multithreading.
Make a thread thats sole purpose is input from stdin. whenever it gets a line, it stores it somewhere accessable by a "main" thread, then wakes the main thread up. The main thread processes the new data, then goes back to sleep.
Make a thread thats sole purpose is input from stdin. whenever it gets a line, it stores it somewhere accessable by a "main" thread, then wakes the main thread up. The main thread processes the new data, then goes back to sleep.
That's probably a lot more complicated than nonblocking I/O, since you need to implement the thread synchronization. And multi-threaded code is a poin to debug.
Hi Tim,
It is unclear whether you are using shell scripts for the client & server ...or you are using C (under the UNIX platform)
I assume that you are using C ... (because you have posted the question in the C programming section.
Getting back to your question...
You can use the select() function for achieving this.
the following is a sample code from the unix man pages:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(void) {
fd_set rfds;
struct timeval tv;
int retval;
/* Watch stdin (fd 0) to see when it has input. */
FD_ZERO(&rfds);
FD_SET(0, &rfds); // here '0' is for stdin
/* Wait up to five seconds. */
tv.tv_sec = 5;
tv.tv_usec = 0;
retval = select(1, &rfds, NULL, NULL, &tv);
/* Don't rely on the value of tv now! */
if (retval == -1)
perror("select()");
else
if (retval)
printf("Data is available now.\n");
/* FD_ISSET(0, &rfds) will be true. */
else
/*here you can write code to proceed with the checking of message queue...*/
printf("No data within five seconds.\n");
return 0;
}
you can use the above select code fragment to check whether there is data available at the stdin ...you can set the tv.tv_sec to a lower value to avoid waiting for longer ..
Regards,
Punit
It is unclear whether you are using shell scripts for the client & server ...or you are using C (under the UNIX platform)
I assume that you are using C ... (because you have posted the question in the C programming section.
Getting back to your question...
You can use the select() function for achieving this.
the following is a sample code from the unix man pages:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(void) {
fd_set rfds;
struct timeval tv;
int retval;
/* Watch stdin (fd 0) to see when it has input. */
FD_ZERO(&rfds);
FD_SET(0, &rfds); // here '0' is for stdin
/* Wait up to five seconds. */
tv.tv_sec = 5;
tv.tv_usec = 0;
retval = select(1, &rfds, NULL, NULL, &tv);
/* Don't rely on the value of tv now! */
if (retval == -1)
perror("select()");
else
if (retval)
printf("Data is available now.\n");
/* FD_ISSET(0, &rfds) will be true. */
else
/*here you can write code to proceed with the checking of message queue...*/
printf("No data within five seconds.\n");
return 0;
}
you can use the above select code fragment to check whether there is data available at the stdin ...you can set the tv.tv_sec to a lower value to avoid waiting for longer ..
Regards,
Punit
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