Forking with a socket

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

I am writing my test harnesses and I'd like one script to make a server and then run the client against the server. Server creation happens fine, and the client connects and does it's stuff fine, but termination (i.e. completion/exiting) never happens. I suspect this is because of open filehandles/sockets, but I can't work out how to fix it. An extract of the relevant forking code is below -- any advice? (full code in http://search.cpan.org/author/NATE/WWW-SearchBroker-0.07/, extract from Broker.pm)

        carp '[BROKER: Forking infinite loop]' if DEBUG >= DEBUG_MEDIU
+M;
        my $ret;
        if ($ret = fork()) {
                carp "[BROKER: Parent returning (child PID=$ret)]" if 
+DEBUG >= D
EBUG_MEDIUM;
                # perldoc -f fork tells us to reopen to /dev/null, wil
+l this wor
k?
                close($self->{_server});
                $self->DESTROY;
                return $ret;
        }
        carp '[BROKER: Child looping]' if DEBUG >= DEBUG_MEDIUM;
        while ($self->event_loop())
                { }
        return undef;
[download]

Comment on Forking with a socket Download Code

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Re: Forking with a socket by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Jul 07, 2003 at 01:15 UTC
In your last line, you return to the caller in the child process. That leaves the child continuing with a copy of the remaining parent code. Change to `while ($self->event_loop()) { } exit 0;` [download] After Compline, Zaxo	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Forking with a socket by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 07, 2003 at 11:00 UTC
For something similar (but not quite easily adapted to other cases, as the server used is too simple) take a look at Test::HTTP::LocalServer, which I use for end-to-end tests of WWW::Mechanize::Shell. `perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ; # The $d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider ($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new #in the HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' # web` [download]	[reply] [d/l]