Piping STDOUT to 'more'

myocom has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

In trying to come up with a solution to print 'more'., I found myself looking at the results of this one-liner:

Win32: perl -e"open STDOUT, '| more'; print qq($_\n) for (1..1000)"
Unix: perl -e'open STDOUT, "| more"; print qq($_\n) for (1..1000)'

Can anyone explain what the heck is happening around line 850 or so (the exact line seems to vary depending on your OS and possibly on your window size)? I thought perhaps it had something to do with buffering, but adding a $|++ in there doesn't seem to affect it a-tall.

"One word of warning: if you meet a bunch of Perl programmers on the bus or something, don't look them in the eye. They've been known to try to convert the young into Perl monks." - Frank Willison

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Re: Piping STDOUT to 'more' by zengargoyle (Deacon) on Mar 20, 2002 at 23:55 UTC
perl -e '$\|++;open STDOUT, "\|more";print qq($_\n)for(1..1000);close STDOUT' Works for me. I don't really know why...	[reply]
Re: Re: Piping STDOUT to 'more' by ariels (Curate) on Mar 21, 2002 at 10:20 UTC
The manpage for close says: Closing a pipe also waits for the process executing on the pipe to complete. This explains what's going on. If you don't `close STDOUT`, your process exits immediately when it finishes putting data into the queue. If you do, Perl waits for the `more` process to terminate (so it can provide an exit status). If you add a `wait` after the loop (instead of `close STDOUT`), the `more` process runs "correctly". But if you page your way all the way through the file, you deadlock on Perl waiting for `more` to terminate, and `more` waiting for more data or end of file to terminate. (Typing <samp>q</samp> to exit more exits both programs, of course).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Piping STDOUT to 'more' by myocom (Deacon) on Mar 21, 2002 at 01:07 UTC
Interesting. Even explicitly closing STDOUT doesn't fix the problem for me (Perl 5.6.1 on WinXP). The speculation around the office is that the perl.exe process is going away before the more process. "One word of warning: if you meet a bunch of Perl programmers on the bus or something, don't look them in the eye. They've been known to try to convert the young into Perl monks." - Frank Willison	[reply]


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