Re^2: Opening URL in instrumented browser

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Re^3: Opening URL in instrumented browser by dasgar (Priest) on Sep 17, 2013 at 17:11 UTC
From the documentation on system: Does exactly the same thing as exec LIST , except that a fork is done first and the parent process waits for the child process to exit. Another alternative would be to use backticks instead of system. I personally consider this as a "quick" and "dirty" method even though I do use it a lot. There are some potential problems with using this method. Off hand I don't remember what all of the issues are, but I believe that there are better ways to launch another program and return control back to the Perl script without waiting for the launched program to return control.	[reply]
Re^3: Opening URL in instrumented browser by Arunbear (Prior) on Sep 18, 2013 at 10:18 UTC
Yes, it is a blocking call: `% perl -E 'system(q[opera http://www.perlmonks.org/]); say "hello!" ' + hello!` [download] That only prints "hello!" once Opera exists. Non-blocking alternatives are: `% perl -E 'system(q[opera http://www.perlmonks.org/ &]); say "hello!" +' hello!` [download] i.e. launching in the background, or `% perl -E '$r = fork; if($r == 0) { exec(q[opera http://www.perlmonks. +org/]) } elsif(defined $r) { say "hello!" }' hello!` [download] which forks off a child process, and uses exec (so the child process doesn't hang around waiting for the browser process to end).	[reply] [d/l] [select]