How should my program behave to handle errors?

Question

I have written a program (with code from SO) that does printenv | sort | less and now I should implement error-handling. How can that be done? The program should fail gracefully, for example when passed the wrong arguments.

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
struct command
{
    const char **argv;
};
/* Helper function that spawns processes */
int spawn_proc (int in, int out, struct command *cmd) {
    pid_t pid;
    if ((pid = fork ()) == 0) {
        if (in != 0) {
            dup2 (in, 0);
            close (in);
        }
        if (out != 1) {
            dup2 (out, 1);
            close (out);
        }
        return execvp (cmd->argv [0], (char * const *)cmd->argv);
    }
    return pid;
}
/* Helper function that forks pipes */
int fork_pipes (int n, struct command *cmd) {
    int i;
    int in, fd [2];
    for (i = 0; i < n - 1; ++i) {
        pipe (fd);
        spawn_proc (in, fd [1], cmd + i);
        close (fd [1]);
        in = fd [0];
    }
    dup2 (in, 0);
    return execvp (cmd [i].argv [0], (char * const *)cmd [i].argv);
}

int main (int argc, char ** argv) {
    int i;
    if (argc == 1) { /* There were no arguments */
        const char *printenv[] = { "printenv", 0};
        const char *sort[] = { "sort", 0 };
        const char *less[] = { "less", 0 };
        struct command cmd [] = { {printenv}, {sort}, {less} };
        return fork_pipes (3, cmd);
    }
    if (argc > 1) { /* I'd like an argument */

        if (strncmp(argv[1], "cd", 2) && strncmp(argv[1], "exit", 2)) {
            char *tmp;
            int len = 1;
            for( i=1; i<argc; i++)
            {
                len += strlen(argv[i]) + 2;
            }
            tmp = (char*) malloc(len);
            tmp[0] = '\0';
            int pos = 0;
            for( i=1; i<argc; i++)
            {
                pos += sprintf(tmp+pos, "%s%s", (i==1?"":"|"), argv[i]);
            }
            const char *printenv[] = { "printenv", 0};
            const char *grep[] = { "grep", "-E", tmp, NULL};
            const char *sort[] = { "sort", 0 };
            const char *less[] = { "less", 0 };
            struct command cmd [] = { {printenv}, {grep}, {sort}, {less} };
            return fork_pipes (4, cmd);
            free(tmp);
        } else if (! strncmp(argv[1], "cd", 2)) { /* change directory */
            printf("change directory to %s\n" , argv[2]);
            chdir(argv[2]);
        } else if (! strncmp(argv[1], "exit", 2)) { /* change directory */
            printf("exit\n");
            exit(0);
        }
    }
    exit(0);
}

Answer 1

It's going to be frankly a bit painful to go through your program and fix all those missing-error-handling bugs after the fact. Much better would have been to write correct code from the start! Moreover, you have more bugs than just missing error handling. I didn't scan all of your code, but at first glance I already saw one use of an uninitialized local variable (in in fork_pipes is used before it is set). Any decent compiler with warnings enabled would have caught that.

As a direct answer to your question, you'll just have to go through and spot every system call or library function call that is capable of returning errors, see if you are checking for them, and add checks if they are not already there. fork, malloc, dup2 — everything.