Hi, Thanks for the reply .. right now, i was reading and checking for the errno EAGAIN, but my loop would prematurely exit. I later found out that the errnor returned by read was ECHILD ... looking at the read(3) manpages ... this errno is not mentioned But since the process that is supposed to write to the pipe is a forked processs .. does that change anything ? Thanks, Saurabh On Dec 6, 2007 4:29 PM, Steve Graegert <graegerts@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Dec 6, 2007 9:14 PM, Saurabh Sehgal <saurabh.r.s@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I had a basic question about read . I have a file descriptor marked > > with non blocking I/O , and I want to read data from the file > > descriptor. This file descriptor is the read end of a UNIX pipe. > > > > The process that the pipe reads from is a very slow process. Hence I > > need to poll and keep on trying to read from the fd until the process > > has actually written something to the pipe. I execute read while the > > errno condition EAGAIN is true. Will this ever result in an infinite > > loop ? (lets say the remote process dies and doesnt write anything to > > the pipe, will I go into an infinite loop since I am polling while > > EAGAIN is true ?). > > Hi, > > I'd suggest taking a look at select(2) which allows for the > specification of a timeout. Use pselect(2) if you are waiting for a > signal as well as data from a file descriptor or otherwise the > select(2) call may block indefinitely due to a nasty race condition > that may occur. > > To your question: There are actually a couple of reasons why your > process would or would not run indefinitely in that loop. There are > also a couple of other errors read(3) can return that might cause your > condition to return false, thus breaking the loop (if I understood > correctly, code example is welcome). What about EINTR which is > returned when the call was interrupted by a signal before any data was > read? (Please note that for a FIFO or pipe it will never return EINTR > if any data has been read.) > > \Steve > > -- > > Steve Grägert > DigitalEther.de > - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-c-programming" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
