how to catch stderr from a failed exec command?

When failing to launch an exec command – I can only get a bad return code from the exec – how can I also get the stderr?

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

int main(){
    char* argv[] = {"bla", NULL};
    execvp(argv[0], argv);
    printf("exec failed\n");
    return 0;
}

In this snippet the printf is only reached if the execvp breaks – which in my case it does. I’m interested in getting the output of the shell for trying to run bla:

Command 'bla' not found, did you mean:

  command 'tla' from deb tla (1.3.5+dfsg1-2build1)
  command 'bwa' from deb bwa (0.7.17-4)
  command 'bls' from deb bacula-sd (9.4.2-2ubuntu5)

Try: sudo apt install <deb name>

How can I find it? tried playing with errno but didn’t find the data I’m looking for

errno try:

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

int main() {
  char* argv[] = {"bla", NULL};
  execvp(argv[0], argv);
  printf("exec failed\n %d", errno);
  return 0;
}

returns 2 – but no info.

2 is " 2 ENOENT No such file or directory" – but I still want Bash‘s stderr

>Solution :

You need to #include <errno.h>, you can also use perror() to get more information about the error:

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

int main(void)
{
    char* argv[] = {"bla", NULL};

    execvp(argv[0], argv);
    perror("execvp");
    fprintf(stderr, "errno: %d\n", errno);
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}

Output:

execvp: No such file or directory
errno: 2