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EXEC(3) Library Functions Manual EXEC(3) NAME execl, execlp, execle, exect, execv, execvp, execvpe, execvP -- execute a file LIBRARY Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS #include <unistd.h> extern char **environ; int execl(const char *path, const char *arg, ..., NULL); int execlp(const char *file, const char *arg, ..., NULL); int execle(const char *path, const char *arg, ..., NULL, char *const envp[]); int exect(const char *path, char *const argv[], char *const envp[]); int execv(const char *path, char *const argv[]); int execvp(const char *file, char *const argv[]); int execvpe(const char *file, char *const argv[], char *const envp[]); int execvP(const char *file, const char *search_path, char *const argv[]); DESCRIPTION The exec family of functions replaces the current process image with a new process image. The functions described in this manual page are front-ends for the function execve(2). (See the manual page for execve(2) for detailed information about the replacement of the current process.) The initial argument for these functions is the pathname of a file which is to be executed. The const char *arg and subsequent ellipses in the execl(), execlp(), and execle() functions can be thought of as arg0, arg1, ..., argn. To- gether they describe a list of one or more pointers to null-terminated strings that represent the argument list available to the executed pro- gram. The first argument, by convention, should point to the file name associated with the file being executed. The list of arguments must be terminated by a NULL pointer. The exect(), execv(), execvp(), execvpe(), and execvP() functions pro- vide an array of pointers to null-terminated strings that represent the argument list available to the new program. The first argument, by convention, should point to the file name associated with the file be- ing executed. The array of pointers must be terminated by a NULL pointer. The execle(), exect(), and execvpe() functions also specify the envi- ronment of the executed process by following the NULL pointer that ter- minates the list of arguments in the argument list or the pointer to the argv array with an additional argument. This additional argument is an array of pointers to null-terminated strings and must be termi- nated by a NULL pointer. The other functions take the environment for the new process image from the external variable environ in the current process. Some of these functions have special semantics. The functions execlp(), execvp(), execvpe(), and execvP() will dupli- cate the actions of the shell in searching for an executable file if the specified file name does not contain a slash "/" character. For execlp() and execvp(), execvpe(), search path is the path specified in the environment by "PATH" variable. If this variable is not specified, the default path is set according to the _PATH_DEFPATH definition in <paths.h>, which is set to "/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin". For execvP(), the search path is specified as an argument to the function. In addition, certain errors are treated specially. If an error is ambiguous (for simplicity, we shall consider all errors except ENOEXEC as being ambiguous here, although only the critical er- ror EACCES is really ambiguous), then these functions will act as if they stat the file to determine whether the file exists and has suit- able execute permissions. If it does, they will return immediately with the global variable errno restored to the value set by execve(). Otherwise, the search will be continued. If the search completes with- out performing a successful execve() or terminating due to an error, these functions will return with the global variable errno set to EACCES or ENOENT according to whether at least one file with suitable execute permissions was found. If the header of a file is not recognized (the attempted execve() re- turned ENOEXEC), these functions will execute the shell with the path of the file as its first argument. (If this attempt fails, no further searching is done.) The function exect() executes a file with the program tracing facili- ties enabled (see ptrace(2)). RETURN VALUES If any of the exec() functions returns, an error will have occurred. The return value is -1, and the global variable errno will be set to indicate the error. FILES /bin/sh The shell. COMPATIBILITY Historically, the default path for the execlp() and execvp() functions was ":/bin:/usr/bin". This was changed to remove the current directory to enhance system security. The behavior of execlp() and execvp() when errors occur while attempt- ing to execute the file is not quite historic practice, and has not traditionally been documented and is not specified by the POSIX stan- dard. Traditionally, the functions execlp() and execvp() ignored all errors except for the ones described above and ETXTBSY, upon which they re- tried after sleeping for several seconds, and ENOMEM and E2BIG, upon which they returned. They now return for ETXTBSY, and determine exis- tence and executability more carefully. In particular, EACCES for in- accessible directories in the path prefix is no longer confused with EACCES for files with unsuitable execute permissions. In 4.4BSD, they returned upon all errors except EACCES, ENOENT, ENOEXEC and ETXTBSY. This was inferior to the traditional error handling, since it breaks the ignoring of errors for path prefixes and only improves the handling of the unusual ambiguous error EFAULT and the unusual error EIO. The behaviour was changed to match the behaviour of sh(1). ERRORS The execl(), execle(), execlp(), execvp(), execvpe(), and execvP() functions may fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the library functions execve(2) and malloc(3). The exect() and execv() functions may fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the library function execve(2). SEE ALSO sh(1), execve(2), fork(2), ktrace(2), ptrace(2), environ(7) STANDARDS The execl(), execv(), execle(), execlp() and execvp() functions conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 ("POSIX.1"). The execvpe() function is a GNU extension. HISTORY The exec() function appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX. The execl() and execv() functions appeared in Version 2 AT&T UNIX. The execlp(), execle(), execve(), and execvp() functions appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX. The execvP() function first appeared in FreeBSD 5.2. The execvpe() function first appeared in FreeBSD 15.0. BUGS The type of the argv and envp parameters to execle(), exect(), execv(), execvp(), execvpe(), and execvP() is a historical accident and no sane implementation should modify the provided strings. The bogus parameter types trigger false positives from const correctness analyzers. On FreeBSD, the __DECONST() macro may be used to work around this limita- tion. Due to a fluke of the C standard, on platforms other than FreeBSD the definition of NULL may be the untyped number zero, rather than a (void *)0 expression. To distinguish the concepts, they are referred to as a "null pointer constant" and a "null pointer", respectively. On exotic computer architectures that FreeBSD does not support, the null pointer constant and null pointer may have a different representation. In gen- eral, where this document and others reference a NULL value, they actu- ally imply a null pointer. E.g., for portability to non-FreeBSD oper- ating systems on exotic computer architectures, one may use (char *)NULL in place of NULL when invoking execl(), execle(), and execlp(). FreeBSD 14.3 December 11, 2023 EXEC(3)
NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUES | FILES | COMPATIBILITY | ERRORS | SEE ALSO | STANDARDS | HISTORY | BUGS
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