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EXEC(3) FreeBSD Library Functions Manual EXEC(3) NAME execl, execlp, execle, exect, execv, 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, ...); int execlp(const char *file, const char *arg, ...); int execle(const char *path, const char *arg, ...); 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[]); 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. Together they describe a list of one or more pointers to null-terminated strings that represent the argument list available to the executed program. 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(), and execvp() functions provide 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 being executed. The array of pointers must be terminated by a NULL pointer. The execle() and exect() functions also specify the environment of the executed process by following the NULL pointer that terminates the list of arguments in the parameter list or the pointer to the argv array with an additional parameter. This additional parameter is an array of point- ers to null-terminated strings and must be terminated 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() and execvp() will duplicate the actions of the shell in searching for an executable file if the specified file name does not contain a slash ``/'' character. The search path is the path speci- fied in the environment by ``PATH'' variable. If this variable isn't specified, the default path is set according to the _PATH_DEFPATH defini- tion in <paths.h>, which is set to ``/usr/bin:/bin''. In addition, cer- tain 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 error EACCES is really ambiguous), then these functions will act as if they stat the file to determine whether the file exists and has suitable exe- cute 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 without 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 isn't recognized (the attempted execve() returned 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 facilities 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. ERRORS Execl(), execle(), execlp() and execvp() may fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the library functions execve(2) and malloc(3). Exect() and execv() may fail and set errno for any of the errors speci- fied for the library function execve(2). SEE ALSO sh(1), execve(2), fork(2), ktrace(2), ptrace(2), environ(7) COMPATIBILITY Historically, the default path for the execlp() and execvp() functions was ``:/bin:/usr/bin''. This was changed to place the current directory last to enhance system security. The behavior of execlp() and execvp() when errors occur while attempting to execute the file is not quite historic practice, and has not tradi- tionally been documented and is not specified by the POSIX standard. Traditionally, the functions execlp() and execvp() ignored all errors except for the ones described above and ETXTBSY, upon which they retried after sleeping for several seconds, and ENOMEM and E2BIG, upon which they returned. They now return for ETXTBSY, and determine existence and exe- cutability more carefully. In particular, EACCES for inaccessible direc- tories 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). STANDARDS Execl(), execv(), execle(), execlp() and execvp() conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 (``POSIX.1''). FreeBSD 11.1 January 24, 1994 FreeBSD 11.1
NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUES | FILES | ERRORS | SEE ALSO | COMPATIBILITY | STANDARDS
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