Strangely enough, the documentation from Microsoft does not mention neither any domain for some sort of interprocess communication within a single host. Maybe Perl does some sort of emulation when using socketpair in Windows?

Further testing, even when avoiding using shutdown in the sockets/filehandles the application returns ECONNRESET.

Is it possible to use Windows named pipes to do the same trick with select? Looks like I'm running out of options.

UPDATED: just for testing, I changed the code:

sub _mswin_pipe {

    my ( $read, $write ) =
      IO::Socket->socketpair( AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC );
[download]

to:

sub _mswin_pipe {

    my ( $read, $write ) =
      IO::Socket->socketpair( AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC );
[download]

The result was a disaster: the external program was executed once, communication with the parent process was lost and (since my code is designed to try to fork new children) a lot of srvrmgr.exe were opened.