Let's suppose we have a code doing something like this:

int pipes[2];
pipe(pipes);
pid_t p = fork();
if(0 == p)
{
   dup2(pipes[1], STDOUT_FILENO);
   execv("/path/to/my/program", NULL);
   ...
}
else
{
//... parent process stuff
}

As you can see, it's creating a pipe, forking and using the pipe to read the child's output (I can't use popen here, because I also need the PID of the child process for other purposes).

Question is, what should happen if in the above code, execv fails? Should I call exit() or abort()? As far as I know, those functions close the open file descriptors. Since fork-ed process inherits the parent's file descriptors, does it mean that the file descriptors used by the parent process will become unusable?