read() from stdin

Question

Consider the following line of code:

while((n = read(STDIN_FILENO, buff, BUFSIZ)) > 0)

As per my understanding read/write functions are a part of non-buffered I/O. So does that mean read() function will read only one character per call from stdio? Or in other words, the value of n will be

    -1  in case of error
n =  0  in case of EOF
     1  otherwise

If it is not the case, when would the above read() function will return and why?

Note: I was also thinking that read() will wait until it successfully reads BUFSIZ number of characters from stdin. But what happens in a case number of characters available to read are less than BUFSIZ? Will read wait forever or until EOF arrives (Ctrl + D on unix or Ctrl + Z on windows)?

Also, lets say BUFSIZ = 100 and stdin = ACtrl+D (i.e EOF immediately following a single character). Now how many times the while loop will iterate?

Answer 1

The way read() behaves depends on what is being read. For regular files, if you ask for N characters, you get N characters if they are available, less than N if end of file intervenes.

If read() is reading from a terminal in canonical/cooked mode, the tty driver provides data a line at a time. So if you tell read() to get 3 characters or 300, read will hang until the tty driver has seen a newline or the terminal's defined EOF key, and then read() will return with either the number of characters in the line or the number of characters you requested, whichever is smaller.

If read() is reading from a terminal in non-canonical/raw mode, read will have access to keypresses immediately. If you ask read() to get 3 characters it might return with anywhere from 0 to 3 characters depending on input timing and how the terminal was configured.

read() will behave differently in the face of signals, returning with less than the requested number of characters, or -1 with errno set to EINTR if a signal interrupted the read before any characters arrived.

read() will behave differently if the descriptor has been configured for non-blocking I/O. read() will return -1 with errno set to EAGAIN or EWOULDBLOCK if no input was immediately available. This applies to sockets.

So as you can see, you should be ready for surprises when you call read(). You won't always get the number of characters you requested, and you might get non-fatal errors like EINTR, which means you should retry the read().

Answer 2

Your code reads:

while((n = read(0, buff, BUFSIZ) != 0))

This is flawed - the parentheses mean it is interpreted as:

while ((n = (read(0, buff, BUFSIZ) != 0)) != 0)

where the boolean condition is evaluated before the assignment, so n will only obtain the values 0 (the condition is not true) and 1 (the condition is true).

You should write:

while ((n = read(0, buff, BUFSIZ)) > 0)

This stops on EOF or a read error, and n lets you know which condition you encountered.

---

Apparently, the code above was a typo in the question.

Unbuffered I/O will read up to the number of characters you read (but not more). It may read less on account of EOF or an error. It may also read less because less is available at the time of the call. Consider a terminal; typically, that will only read up to the end of line because there isn't any more available than that. Consider a pipe; if the feeding process has generated 128 unread bytes, then if BUFSIZ is 4096, you'll only get 128 bytes from the read. A non-blocking file descriptor may return because nothing is available; a socket may return fewer bytes because there isn't more information available yet; a disk read may return fewer bytes because there are fewer than the requested number of bytes left in the file when the read is performed.

In general, though, read() won't return just one byte if you request many bytes.

Answer 3

As the read() manpage states:

Return Value

On success, the number of bytes read is returned (zero indicates end of file), and the file position is advanced by this number. It is not an error if this number is smaller than the number of bytes requested; this may happen for example because fewer bytes are actually available right now (maybe because we were close to end-of-file, or because we are reading from a pipe, or from a terminal), or because read() was interrupted by a signal. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately. In this case it is left unspecified whether the file position (if any) changes.

So, each read() will read up to the number of specified bytes; but it may read less. "Non-buffered" means that if you specify read(fd, bar, 1), read will only read one byte. Buffered IO attempts to read in quanta of BUFSIZ, even if you only want one character. This may sound wasteful, but it avoids the overhead of making system calls, which makes it fast.

Answer 4

1. read attempts to get all of characters requested.
2. if EOF happens before all of the requested characters can be returned, it returns what it got after it does this the next read returns -1, to let you know you the file end.

What happens when it tries to read and there is nothing there involves something called blocking. You can call open to read a file blocking or non-blocking. "blocking" means wait until there is something to return.

This is what you see in a shell waiting for input. It sits there. Until you hit return.

Non-blocking means that read will return no bytes of data if there are none. Depending on a lot of other factors which would make a completely correct answer unusable for you, read will set errno to something like EWOULDBLOCK, which lets you know why your read returned zero bytes. It is not necessarily a fatal error.

Your code could test for a minus to find EOF or errors

Answer 5

When we say read is unbuffered, it means no buffering takes place at the level of your process after the data is pulled off the underlying open file description, which is a potentially-shared resource. If stdin is a terminal, there are likely at least 2 additional buffers in play, however:

1. The terminal buffer, which can probably hold 1-4k of data off the line until.
2. The kernel's cooked/canonical mode buffer for line entry/editing on a terminal, which lets the user perform primitive editing (backspace, backword, erase line, etc.) on the line until it's submitted (to the buffer described above) by pressing enter.

read will pull whatever has already been submitted, up to the max read length you passed to it, but it cannot pull anything from the line editing buffer. If you want to disable this extra layer of buffering, you need to lookup how to disable cooked/canonical mode for a terminal using tcsetattr, etc.