c - Program received signal SIGPIPE, Broken pipe

Question

I write a client program based on posix sockets. The program creates multiple threads and is going to lock the server. But during debug in gdb time the program gives an info (error)

(gdb) n
Program received signal SIGPIPE, Broken pipe. [Switching to Thread 0xb74c0b40 (LWP 4864)] 0xb7fdd424 in __kernel_vsyscall () 
(gdb) 

Here's the code:

#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int get_hostname_by_ip(char* h , char* ip)
{
    struct hostent *he;
    struct in_addr **addr_list;
    int i;

    if ((he = gethostbyname(h)) == NULL) 
    {
        perror("gethostbyname");
        return 1;
    }
    addr_list = (struct in_addr **) he->h_addr_list;
    for(i = 0; addr_list[i] != NULL; i++) 
    {
        strcpy(ip , inet_ntoa(*addr_list[i]) );
        return 0;
    }

    return 1;
}

void client(char* h, int s)
{
    int fd;
    struct sockaddr_in addr;
    char ch[]="aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa";
    fd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
    addr.sin_family=AF_INET;
    char* ip = new char[20];
    get_hostname_by_ip(h, ip);
    addr.sin_addr.s_addr=inet_addr(ip);
    int port = 80;
    addr.sin_port=htons(port);
    if(connect(fd, (struct sockaddr*)&addr, sizeof(addr)) < 0) 
    {
        perror("connect error");
        return;
    }
    while(1)
    {
        if(send(fd, ch, sizeof(ch), 0) < 0)
        {   
            perror("send");
        }
    }
    //char buffer[1024];
    //if(recv(fd, &buffer, sizeof(buffer), 0) < 0)
    //{ 
    //  perror("recive");
    //}

    //printf("nReply from Server: %s
", buffer);
    close(fd);
}

struct info
{
    char* h;
    int c;
};


void* thread_entry_point(void* i)
{
    info* in = (info*)i;
    client(in->h, in->c);
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    int s = atoi(argv[2]);
    pthread_t t[s];
    info in = {argv[1], s};
    for(int i = 0; i < s; ++i)
    {
        pthread_create(&t[i], NULL, thread_entry_point, (void*)&in);
    }
    pthread_join(t[0], NULL);

    return 0;
}

What it is and what to do?

Answer 1

The process received a SIGPIPE. The default behaviour for this signal is to end the process.

A SIGPIPE is sent to a process if it tried to write to a socket that had been shutdown for writing or isn't connected (anymore).

To avoid that the program ends in this case, you could either

• make the process ignore SIGPIPE

  #include <signal.h>
  
  int main(void)
  {
    sigaction(SIGPIPE, &(struct sigaction){SIG_IGN}, NULL);
  
    ...
  

  or

• install an explicit handler for SIGPIPE (typically doing nothing):

  #include <signal.h>
  
  void sigpipe_handler(int unused)
  {
  }
  
  int main(void)
  {
    sigaction(SIGPIPE, &(struct sigaction){sigpipe_handler}, NULL);
  
    ...
  

In both cases send*()/write() would return -1 and set errno to EPIPE.