Hi --

I've never used Perl for anything pipe-like before. The following is my attempt, running on Activestate 5.8.0 on WinXP. The code below is a framework, not my full-blown module.

I found the perl docs hard to understand for IPC::Open3. The following rough hackish code works but I'd like any comments on how I could be doing it better.

Should I be checking that the pipe opened? If so how? Should I have error checking elsewhere? Should I be closing the pipe gracefully, rather than killing it? And am I killing it correctly?

Thanks for helping me learn--

rkg

package Word::Spell;

use strict;
use warnings;
use lib qw(c:\ blah blah blah blah);
use base qw(Exporter);
our @EXPORT_OK = qw(spell);

use IPC::Open3;
my ($pid, $wph, $rph, $eph);

BEGIN {
    my $cmd = 'c:/apps/aspell/bin/aspell';
    my $args = '-a'; #-pipe --ignore-case --sug-mode=normal';
    $pid = open3($wph, $rph, $eph,$cmd, $args);
    # eat and confirm the id line
    my $idline = <$rph>;
    die "bad idline: $idline" unless $idline =~ /Aspell 0.50.3/;
}

sub spell {
    my ($word) = @_;
    die "word '$word' has spaces" if $word =~ /\s/;
    die "word '$word' has numbers" if $word =~ /\d/;
    die "word '$word' has odd chars" if $word =~ /[^A-Z-]/i;
    print $wph "^$word\n";
    my $result = <$rph>;
    return $result;
}

END {
    kill 9, $pid;
}


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