While I do see that there is a problem, it is only half of the story, and
your patch addresses only this half.
What if stdout is closed, too? Then the ends of the first allocated pipe
would go to fds 0 and 1, and then the pipe end at 1 would be closed by a
subsequent dup2(xxx, 1).
What about opening files (in start_command, protected by a loop that run
only once, or on startup) until you get a descriptor that is > 2? Like
this:
static int low_fds_reserved;
if (!low_fds_reserved)
{
int fd = open("/dev/null", O_RDWR);
while (fd >= 0 && fd <= 2)
fd = dup (fd);
if (fd != -1)
close (fd);
else
perror ("start_command");
low_fds_reserved = 1;
}
Paolo