User service daemon and client specification - Execution environment of the service program

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# User service daemon and client specification - Chapter 3
Execution environment of the service program

The daemon which is handling the service user side of things will read configuration files to decide what to do. If it decides to allow the service to be provided it will fork a subprocess to execute the service.

The service will have no controlling terminal, but it will be a process group leader.

If the client is killed or times out or a file or descriptor being read or written by the client process gets an error then the service will be disconnected from the client. The client will return an exit status of 255 and some the service's pipes may be closed at the other end. The service will become a child of `init`. The service may well not notice the disconnection, though writing to a pipe after this may produce a `SIGPIPE` and the facility exists to have a `SIGHUP` sent to the service on disconnection.

## 3.1 File descriptors

The service program's standard filedescriptors, and possibly other file descriptors, will be connected to pipes or to `/dev/null`. The `userv` client/daemon pair will arrange that data is copied between the files or file descriptors specified to to the client by the caller and these these pipes.

Pipes which may be written to will be closed if a write error occurs on the corresponding client-side file or descriptor, which may result in a `SIGPIPE` in the service program; pipes open for reading will get `EOF` if the client-side file descriptor gets `EOF` or an error.

If the service closes one of its reading file descriptors the writing end of the corresponding pipe will generate a `SIGPIPE` when attempts are made by the client/daemon pair to write to it. This will not be considered an error; rather, the relevant pipe will be discarded and the corresponding file or file descriptor held by the client will be closed.

Likewise, if one of the file descriptors held by the client for writing by the service is a pipe whose other end is closed by the caller then the client/daemon pair will see an error when trying to copy data provided by the service. This too will not be considered an error; rather, the pipe correspondong to that descriptor will be closed and any further writes will cause the service to get a `SIGPIPE`.

Note that not all write errors or broken pipes on file descriptors may be visible to the service, since buffered data may be discarded by the operating system and there will be a finite interval between the error happening and the service being disconnected from the client or the next write causing a `SIGPIPE`.

Read errors on file descriptors (and disconnection) will only be visible to the service and distinguishable from normal end of file if `disconnect-hup` is in effect.

Read and write errors (other than broken pipes, as described above) will always be visible to the caller; they are system errors, and will therefore cause the client to print an error message to stderr and return with an exit status of 255.

If the main service program process exits while it still has running children any file descriptors held by those children can remain open, depending on the use of `wait`, `nowait` or `close` for the relevant file descriptor in the client's arguments. By default writing filedescriptors remain open and the client will wait for them to be closed at the service end, and reading file descriptors are closed immediately. These leftover child processes will not get a any `SIGHUP` even if a read or write error occurs or the client disconnects before then.

## 3.2 Environment

The service will have some information in environment variables:

`USERV_USER`
  The login name of the calling user. If the `LOGNAME` variable is set (or, if that is unset, if the `USER` variable is set) in the environment passed to the client by the caller then the password entry for that login name will be looked up; if that password entry's uid is the same as that of the calling process then that login name will be used, otherwise (or if neither `LOGNAME` nor `USER` is set) the calling process's uid will be looked up to determine their login name (and if this lookup fails then the service will not be invoked).
`USERV_UID`
  The uid of the calling process.
`USERV_GID`
  The gid and supplementary group list of the calling process: first the group in gid and then those in the supplementary group list, in decimal, separated by spaces.
`USERV_GROUP`
  The group names of the calling process, listed in the same way as the ids are in `USERV_GID`. If no name can be found for any of the calling process's group(s) then the service will not be invoked.
`USERV_CWD`
  The client's current working directory name (this directory may not be accessible to the service). If it could not be determined or the `--hidecwd` flag was used then this variable will be set to an empty string (this is not considered an error).
`USERV_SERVICE`
  The service name requested by the caller.
`USERV_U_name`
  The value supplied to the client by the caller using -Dname.

`HOME`, `PATH`, `SHELL`, `LOGNAME` and `USER` will be set appropriately (according to the details of the service user).

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User service daemon and client specification