I have the following program to exercise using forks and shared memory.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h> 
#include <unistd.h> 
#include <sys/wait.h>

#include <sys/shm.h>
#include <sys/ipc.h>

int main() {
    int bignum = 1000000;
    
    key_t key = ftok(".", 'x');
    int shmid = shmget(key, sizeof(int)*bignum, IPC_CREAT | 0666);
    if (shmid < 0) {
        perror("shmgetn");
        return 1;
    }
    int *arr = shmat(shmid, NULL, 0);
    pid_t c1 = fork();
    if (c1==0) {
        pid_t c2 = fork();
        if (c2==0) {
            pid_t c3 = fork();
            if (c3==0) {
                arr[0] = 10;
            } else {
                arr[1] = 11;
            }
            wait(NULL);
            exit(0);
        } else {
            arr[2] = 12;
        }
        wait(NULL);
        exit(0);
    } else {
        arr[3] = 13;
        wait(NULL);

        for (int i=0; i<4; i++) printf("%d ", arr[i]);
        printf("n");
    }


    shmdt(arr);
    shmctl(shmid, IPC_RMID, NULL);
    exit(0);
}

I previously ran this program using a smaller amount of shared memory and have now increased it to see if that affects the program in any way. When I run this I get:

shmget
: Invalid argument

I’ve seen this post: C linux shmget Invalid argument

I’ve tried following the advice, but I’m unfamiliar with ipcs and ipcrm. I ran ipcs in a terminal and it gave me some shared memory info. But I can’t tell which is the one allocated by the program, there’s a lot, and I can’t tell what is safe to remove or not.

It also seems odd to me that you wouldn’t just do this inside the C program itself, so that makes me wonder if there isn’t a better way to resolve this issue. I particularly don’t get why the calls to shmdt and shmctl don’t make this a non-issue. Is there some other way to “undo” memory sharing?