Passing arguments to execl - unix

Question

I want to create my own pipeline like in Unix terminal (just to practice). It should take applications to execute in quotes like that:
pipeline "ls -l" "grep" ....
I know that I should use fork(), execl() (exec*) and API to redirect stdin and stdout. But are there any alternatives for execl to execute app with arguments using just one argument which includes application path and arguments? Is there a way not to parse manually ls -l but pass it as one argument to execl?

Answer 1

If you have only a single command line instead of an argument vector, let the shell do the parsing for you:
execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", the_command_line, NULL);
Of course, don't let untrusted remote user input into this command line. But if you are dealing with untrusted remote user input to begin with, you should try to arrange to pass actual a list of isolated arguments to the target application as per normal usage of exec[vl], not a command line.

Answer 2

Realistically, you can only really use execl() when the number of arguments to the command are known at compile time. In a shell, you'll normally use execv() or execvp() instead; these can handle an arbitrary number of arguments to the command to be executed. In theory, you use execv() when the path name of the command is given and execvp() (which does a PATH-based search for the command) when it isn't. However, execvp() handles the 'path given' case, so simply use execvp().
So, for your pipeline command, you'll end up with one child using something equivalent to:
char *args_1[] = { "ls", "-l", 0 };
execvp(args_1[0], args_1);
The other child will end up using something equivalent to:
char *args_2[] = { "grep", "pattern", 0 };
execvp(args_2[0], args_2);
Except, of course, that you'll have created those strings from the command line arguments instead of by initialization as shown. Note that grep requires a pattern to search for.
You've still got plumbing issues to resolve. Make sure you close enough pipe file descriptors. When you dup() or dup2() a pipe to standard input or standard output, you close both the file descriptors from the pipe() function.