I was asking you to post a 'cut-down-to-the-bare-essentials-to-demonstrate-the-problem' version of your script. Trying to debug code based a verbal description of it is like trying to diagnose car trouble from "It makes a sort of cluck-clunk-weeee sound and then stalls":)

It sounds from your description that this is probably a small part of a large script. If you reduce it to something that just demonstrates the failure, it would save anyone trying to help you from having to invent there own test script based upon guesses of what you might be doing.

if (!open(COPY,'>',$copyfile)) #open the file for writting before we s
+tart reading from it
{ 
    $cf_status = 0;
    open(COPY,'>&STDOUT');
};
my $pid;
if ($pid = fork)
{
  redirect_to_file(); #redirect output to the COPY file
  .
  .
  .
  open( OLDOUT, ">&STDOUT" ) or ...;
  open( OLDERR, ">&STDERR" ) or ...;

  # redirect everything to a capture file; fail if it already exists
  if ( !sysopen( STDOUT, $outFile, O_WRONLY|O_EXCL|O_CREAT ) ) { ... }
  open( STDERR, ">& STDOUT" ) or ...;
  select(STDERR); $| = 1;     # make unbuffered
  select(STDOUT); $| = 1;
  binmode( STDOUT );          # don't interpret CRLF/Unicode
  binmode( STDERR );
  system('command');
  open( STDOUT, ">&OLDOUT" ) or ...;
  open( STDERR, ">&OLDERR" ) or ...;
  close( OLDOUT ) or ...;
  close( OLDERR ) or ...;

  end_redirection(); 

  waitpid($pid,0); # wait for child process to finish reading and to e
+xit
}
else
{
  die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
  .
  . #reads from COPY file
  .
}
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edited: Thu Jun 26 15:10:13 2003 by jeffa - code tags