Multipiping in a shell problem.

[seasum]

So I have been trying to implement piping in my own shell program so that I can actually understand what UNIX is doing. I'm very very close at the moment, but for some reason my program is going into an infinite loop when I pipe. I'm pretty sure my problem is stemming from my waitpid arguments not ever letting the last pipe close, because if I make the final loop in the code below be i is less than count-1 instead of i is less than count it will run the command on the left of the pipe. But once I put it back to i is less than count it just loops forever.

For example ls | grep -i cpp would just loop the normal ls command infinitely. I assume this means I'm not closing the pipes correctly, but as far as I can tell I am doing so in both the parent and child just like I am supposed to.

if(pipes)
            for (i=1;i<count;i++){
                 if( pipe(fd) ==-1)
                 {perror("Pipe failure");
                  return;}

            read[i+1] = fd[0];//fd=file descriptor
            write[i] = fd[1];
            }
            }

    for(i=0;i<count;i++){
    pid = fork();
       
         if(pid < 0)
         {printf("fork failed");}
            
         else if(pid>0)
         {pids[i] = pid;}
     
         else
             { if(write[i] != -1)
                   {if(dup2(write[i],STDOUT_FILENO) ==-1){
                                  perror("dup2 failure");
                                  exit(1);
                                 }
                   }
              if(read[i] !=-1)
                    {if (dup2(read[i], STDIN_FILENO)==-1)
                    {perror("dup2 failure");
                     exit(1);}
                    }
   
    for (j=0; j<count; j++)//close copies
    {close(write[j]);
    close(read[j]);}

    execvp(input[i], input);
    exit(1);
         }// end else
    }//end for


 for(i=0; i < count; i++){//deal with children
 waitpid(pids[i], &status,0);

 if(write[i] != -1)
 close(write[i]);

 if( read[i] != -1)

 close (read [i]);

 }

 return (status);}

I think I'm really really close to the solution but for the time being I'm stuck. I've researched piping a ton, but I guess I'm just not quite getting it. Thanks for any help.