[c] How to prevent SIGPIPEs (or handle them properly)

I have a small server program that accepts connections on a TCP or local UNIX socket, reads a simple command and (depending on the command) sends a reply.

The problem is that the client may have no interest in the answer and sometimes exits early. So writing to that socket will cause a SIGPIPE and make my server crash.

What's the best practice to prevent the crash here? Is there a way to check if the other side of the line is still reading? (select() doesn't seem to work here as it always says the socket is writable). Or should I just catch the SIGPIPE with a handler and ignore it?

Handle SIGPIPE Locally

It's usually best to handle the error locally rather than in a global signal event handler since locally you will have more context as to what's going on and what recourse to take.

I have a communication layer in one of my apps that allows my app to communicate with an external accessory. When a write error occurs I throw and exception in the communication layer and let it bubble up to a try catch block to handle it there.

Code:

The code to ignore a SIGPIPE signal so that you can handle it locally is:

// We expect write failures to occur but we want to handle them where 
// the error occurs rather than in a SIGPIPE handler.
signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN);

This code will prevent the SIGPIPE signal from being raised, but you will get a read / write error when trying to use the socket, so you will need to check for that.

What's the best practice to prevent the crash here?

Either disable sigpipes as per everybody, or catch and ignore the error.

Is there a way to check if the other side of the line is still reading?

Yes, use select().

select() doesn't seem to work here as it always says the socket is writable.

You need to select on the read bits. You can probably ignore the write bits.

When the far end closes its file handle, select will tell you that there is data ready to read. When you go and read that, you will get back 0 bytes, which is how the OS tells you that the file handle has been closed.

The only time you can't ignore the write bits is if you are sending large volumes, and there is a risk of the other end getting backlogged, which can cause your buffers to fill. If that happens, then trying to write to the file handle can cause your program/thread to block or fail. Testing select before writing will protect you from that, but it doesn't guarantee that the other end is healthy or that your data is going to arrive.

Note that you can get a sigpipe from close(), as well as when you write.

Close flushes any buffered data. If the other end has already been closed, then close will fail, and you will receive a sigpipe.

If you are using buffered TCPIP, then a successful write just means your data has been queued to send, it doesn't mean it has been sent. Until you successfully call close, you don't know that your data has been sent.

Sigpipe tells you something has gone wrong, it doesn't tell you what, or what you should do about it.

Linux manual said:

EPIPE The local end has been shut down on a connection oriented socket. In this case the process will also receive a SIGPIPE unless MSG_NOSIGNAL is set.

But for Ubuntu 12.04 it isn't right. I wrote a test for that case and I always receive EPIPE withot SIGPIPE. SIGPIPE is genereated if I try to write to the same broken socket second time. So you don't need to ignore SIGPIPE if this signal happens it means logic error in your program.

Another method is to change the socket so it never generates SIGPIPE on write(). This is more convenient in libraries, where you might not want a global signal handler for SIGPIPE.

On most BSD-based (MacOS, FreeBSD...) systems, (assuming you are using C/C++), you can do this with:

int set = 1;
setsockopt(sd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_NOSIGPIPE, (void *)&set, sizeof(int));

With this in effect, instead of the SIGPIPE signal being generated, EPIPE will be returned.

You cannot prevent the process on the far end of a pipe from exiting, and if it exits before you've finished writing, you will get a SIGPIPE signal. If you SIG_IGN the signal, then your write will return with an error - and you need to note and react to that error. Just catching and ignoring the signal in a handler is not a good idea -- you must note that the pipe is now defunct and modify the program's behaviour so it does not write to the pipe again (because the signal will be generated again, and ignored again, and you'll try again, and the whole process could go on for a long time and waste a lot of CPU power).

Under a modern POSIX system (i.e. Linux), you can use the sigprocmask() function.

#include <signal.h>

void block_signal(int signal_to_block /* i.e. SIGPIPE */ )
{
    sigset_t set;
    sigset_t old_state;

    // get the current state
    //
    sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, NULL, &old_state);

    // add signal_to_block to that existing state
    //
    set = old_state;
    sigaddset(&set, signal_to_block);

    // block that signal also
    //
    sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, &set, NULL);

    // ... deal with old_state if required ...
}

If you want to restore the previous state later, make sure to save the old_state somewhere safe. If you call that function multiple times, you need to either use a stack or only save the first or last old_state... or maybe have a function which removes a specific blocked signal.

For more info read the man page.

In this post I described possible solution for Solaris case when neither SO_NOSIGPIPE nor MSG_NOSIGNAL is available.

Instead, we have to temporarily suppress SIGPIPE in the current thread that executes library code. Here's how to do this: to suppress SIGPIPE we first check if it is pending. If it does, this means that it is blocked in this thread, and we have to do nothing. If the library generates additional SIGPIPE, it will be merged with the pending one, and that's a no-op. If SIGPIPE is not pending then we block it in this thread, and also check whether it was already blocked. Then we are free to execute our writes. When we are to restore SIGPIPE to its original state, we do the following: if SIGPIPE was pending originally, we do nothing. Otherwise we check if it is pending now. If it does (which means that out actions have generated one or more SIGPIPEs), then we wait for it in this thread, thus clearing its pending status (to do this we use sigtimedwait() with zero timeout; this is to avoid blocking in a scenario where malicious user sent SIGPIPE manually to a whole process: in this case we will see it pending, but other thread may handle it before we had a change to wait for it). After clearing pending status we unblock SIGPIPE in this thread, but only if it wasn't blocked originally.

Example code at https://github.com/kroki/XProbes/blob/1447f3d93b6dbf273919af15e59f35cca58fcc23/src/libxprobes.c#L156

I'm super late to the party, but SO_NOSIGPIPE isn't portable, and might not work on your system (it seems to be a BSD thing).

A nice alternative if you're on, say, a Linux system without SO_NOSIGPIPE would be to set the MSG_NOSIGNAL flag on your send(2) call.

Example replacing write(...) by send(...,MSG_NOSIGNAL) (see nobar's comment)

char buf[888];
//write( sockfd, buf, sizeof(buf) );
send(    sockfd, buf, sizeof(buf), MSG_NOSIGNAL );

Another method is to change the socket so it never generates SIGPIPE on write(). This is more convenient in libraries, where you might not want a global signal handler for SIGPIPE.

On most BSD-based (MacOS, FreeBSD...) systems, (assuming you are using C/C++), you can do this with:

int set = 1;
setsockopt(sd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_NOSIGPIPE, (void *)&set, sizeof(int));

With this in effect, instead of the SIGPIPE signal being generated, EPIPE will be returned.

Or should I just catch the SIGPIPE with a handler and ignore it?

I believe that is right on. You want to know when the other end has closed their descriptor and that's what SIGPIPE tells you.

Sam