Yes, by default, exec closes all of your file handles except for STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. See $^F in perlvar. But that will probably only be part of the solution. You may also have to turn off the close-on-exec flag on some file handles directly. See F_GETFD and F_SETFD in Fcntl.

The file descriptors are what are not closed so you have to do the equivalent of fdopen() to get Perl file handles reassociated with them:     open( FILE, ">&=$fd" )  or  die ... where $fd is 0 for STDIN, 1 for STDOUT, 2 for STDERR (and Perl already reopened those for you) and you have to pass the new instance of the script the values for the file descriptors you want to reopen, for example:     exec( $^X, $0, fileno(SOCK), fileno(LOG) ); and 

    open( SOCK, "<&=$ARGV[0]" )  or  die ...
    open( LOG, ">>&=$ARGV[1]" )  or  die ...

[download]
Update: Restarting a long-running process from time to time can be very useful (reduces memory footprint, clears likely subtle internal corruptions due to low-profile bugs, etc.). And if you go with catching signals and not restarting the process, then be sure to use Perl v5.8 or later.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: Restarting script without losing handles by tye
in thread Restarting script without losing handles by athomason

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.