pipex

I guess it's save to say most of us used the pipe | character in the termial to perform an operation between two command like cat and wc

cat /etc/passwd | wc -l

which is a very famous duo we all used many time, but have you ever wondered how it works, I mean basically the pipe | makes the output of cat to be the input of wc, we can also redirect the output of wc to file by using > character then the name of the file like this:

cat /etc/passwd | wc -l > output.txt

I asked myself the same question and I decided to make a program to mimic the pipe | and the redirection > operation. I found out it's not that simple to implement such a feature to a program, it involves pipes obviously and I had to work with processes on a system level using fork(), waitpid() and execve(), but it was a fun project and I have learnt a lot from it.

Program name	pipex
Arguments	file1 cmd1 cmd2 file2
External functs	• open, close, read, write, malloc, free, perror, strerror, access, dup, dup2, execve, exit, fork, pipe, unlink, wait, waitpid • My ft_printf library
Libft	My own library
Description	This project is about handling pipes.

How to install:

Clone the repository in the desired directory.

git clone https://github.com/SolarisCode/pipex.git

Then use make inside the pervious directory either with all or bonus rule if you want to use as many pipes as you want and also gain the functionality of here_docs combained with append >> character.

make all

or

make bonus

The program will be executed as follows:

./pipex infile "cat -e" "wc -l" outfile

just like the it does in the termial:

< infile cat -e | wc -l outfile

And if you complied the bonus part you would be able to run it like this:

./pipex file1 cmd1 cmd2 cmd3 ... cmdn file2

It will support << and >> when the first parameter is here_doc:

/pipex here_doc LIMITER cmd cmd1 file

Just like in the termial:

cmd << LIMITER | cmd1 >> file

While the LIMITER is the word of your choice to end the input for the standard input.

Feel free to contact me if you have a better way to implement any of these functionalities :)