hm... I don't think its a fork problem, since window really create a child for the writing thread to the file, its just that the parent thread cannot read it until its child is finish. I think its more or less a flushing problem? Do you agree?

Anyways, I now have the following code, and IE give me a page not found error, do you know why?

#!D:/Perl/bin/Perl.exe -w


use strict;
use CGI ":standard";
use IO::Handle; 
use Win32::Process;
use Win32;
$| = 1;


my $MYFILE = "D:\\tmp";
my $share = "begin";

if (param("monitor")) {
        &monitor();
} else {

            Win32::Process::Create($Process, "D:\\ping.exe yahoo.com >
+ ${MYFILE}",
                                   "ping",0,DETACHED_PROCESS, ".") || 
+die "Create: $!";               
        }
#                      
            print redirect(-uri => url() . "?monitor=yes", -nph=>1);
}

sub monitor
{
        my $html = &draw_page();

        if (defined $html) {
                print header(-refresh=>1, -nph=>1), $html;
        } else {
                print header(-nph=>1), &goodbye();
        }
}

sub goodbye
{
        return start_html(-title=>"Goodbye!") . h1("Goodbye!") . end_h
+tml();
}

sub get_number
{
        open NUMBER, "<$MYFILE" or return undef;
        NUMBER->autoflush(1);
        my $number = <NUMBER>; close NUMBER;

        return $number;

}

sub draw_page
{
        my $number = &get_number();

        return (defined $number) ? start_html(-title=>"Your Lucky Numb
+er") .  p("Your lucky number is $number.") . end_html() : undef;
}

sub do_stuff
{
        for my $i (1 .. 10)
        {
                open NUMBER, ">$MYFILE";
        NUMBER->autoflush(1);
                print NUMBER "$i\n";
                close NUMBER;
                sleep 1;
        }

        unlink $MYFILE;
 
}
[download]