After reading the man pages I understood that shm_open
and shm_unlink
are basically analogous to mmap
and munmap
, with the difference being that shm
is for System V and mmap
is for POSIX. Since both can be used for sharing memory, is there an advantage in using both toghether? For example:
this code
int main( ) {
int size = 1024;
char* name = "test";
int fd = shm_open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0600 );
ftruncate(fd, size);
char *ptr = (char *) mmap(NULL, size, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);
if (fork()) { // parent
ftruncate(fd, size); // cut the file to a specific length
char* msg = (char*)malloc(50*sizeof(char));
sprintf(msg, "parent process with id %d wrote this in shared memory",getpid()); // copy this in msg
strcpy((char*)ptr,msg); // copy msg in ptr (the mmap)
munmap(ptr,size); // parent process no longer has access to this memory space
shm_unlink(name); // parent process is no longer linked to the space named "test"
} else {
sleep(0.00001);
printf("Inside child process %d : %s\n", getpid(), ptr);
munmap(ptr,size);
exit(0);
}
}
will output
Inside child process 5149 : parent process with id 5148 wrote this in shared memory
and if I remove the fd and replace it with -1 and add the flag MAP_ANONYMOUS
,
int main( ) {
int size = 1024;
char* name = "test";
char *ptr = (char *) mmap(NULL, size, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED | MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);
if (fork() != 0) { // parent
char* msg = (char*)malloc(50*sizeof(char));
sprintf(msg, "parent process with id %d wrote this in shared memory",getpid()); // copy this in msg
strcpy((char*)ptr,msg); // copy msg in ptr (the mmap)
munmap(ptr,size); // parent process no longer has access to this memory space
} else {
sleep(0.00001);
printf("Inside child process %d : %s\n", getpid(), ptr);
munmap(ptr,size);
exit(0);
}
}
the output does not change. So why use shm_get?
Thanks