Nowadays I'm running this code in Linux and Windows 7, so no emulation here. :-)

I still trying to understand this trick of using sockets instead of filehandles in Windows to be able to do select without blocking. It seems it solves the problem of blocking, but now I'm having other types of problem. Meanwhile, I will try to answer your question by quoting the same book that is helping me out (Network Programming with Perl from Lincoln D. Stein):

• about Socket's domain, page 63

AF_UNIX is used for interprocess communication within a single host. The name AF_UNIX is unfairly UNIX-specific; it's possible for non-UNIX systems to implement it. For this reason, POSIX has tried to rename this constant AF_LOCAL, although few systems have followed suit.

• About socketpair, page 101:

While in principle socketpair can be used for INET protocol, in practice most systems only support socketpair for creating UNIX-domain sockets.

Of course, I didn't know about those details before researching. As I said before, I just copied the related code and tried to adapt it to my needs.

End of story: after disabling shutdown, the application (srvrmgr.exe) that I'm executing with open3 started behaving correctly (can be reused several times), but waitpid is not being able to kill it later: it was necessary to invoke kill 9 to do the job.

Strange as it seems, running a external process as the Perl script that is shipped with Siebel::Srvrmgr works fine with waitpid in Windows and Linux.

I had updated the SVN repository if you want to take a look.