Parent/Child and pipes in C, child-parent comunication

Question

I have a parent program that sends a integer to a child, and the child program multiplies the number by two and gives back to the parent.

In a main program I create a pipe and fork() and execl() the child, after a switch I pass the value through pip to child in child i can get the value, but How can I get a result back from the child to the parent after a execl()?.

child.c
#include <stdio.h> 
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(){
int fd,nread,result;
char data[20];
fd=atoi(argv[1]);
nread=read(fd,data,sizeof(data));
switch(nread)
{
    case -1:
        break;
    default:
         result=atoi(data)*2;
         sprintf(result,"%d",(result));
         //how can here return data to the parent?
         break;

}
}

Answer 1

Use two pipes.

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

void xclose(int fd);
void xdup2(int a, int b);
int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        int p1[2];
        int p2[2];
        int val = argc > 1 ? strtol(argv[1], NULL, 10) : 1;
        char buf[128];
        int len;
        ssize_t rc;
        if(pipe(p1) || pipe(p2)) {
                perror("pipe");
                return EXIT_FAILURE;
        }
        switch(fork()) {
        case -1:
                perror("fork");
                return EXIT_FAILURE;
        case 0:
                xdup2(p1[0],STDIN_FILENO);
                xclose(p1[0]);
                xclose(p1[1]);
                xdup2(p2[1],STDOUT_FILENO);
                xclose(p2[0]);
                xclose(p2[1]);
                execlp("awk", "awk", "{print $1 * 2}", NULL);
                perror("exec");
                return EXIT_FAILURE;
       default:
                len = sprintf(buf, "%d", val);
                write(p1[1], buf, len);
                xclose(p1[1]);
                xclose(p1[0]);
                xclose(p2[1]);
                if(( rc = read(p2[0], buf, sizeof buf)) == -1) {
                        perror("read");
                }
                xclose(p2[0]);
                buf[rc] = '\0';
                printf("%s", buf);
        }
        return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

void
xclose(int fd) {
        if(close(fd)) {
                perror("close");
                exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
        }
}
void
xdup2(int a, int b) {
        if(dup2(a,b) == -1) {
                perror("dup2");
                exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
        }
}