Thanks for your response. My apologies for the lack of completeness of my post. I was trying to pose a more general question, rather than focus on the specifics of my situation. In response to your queries:

And you're using a flakey executable because...?

From bitter experience, I would say that complex software projects tend to require moderately complex tools to test some aspects of them. The unfortunate part is that it is rare to find the same effort put into testing tools as it is into the original project.

I am currently on a short term contract (6 weeks total), in which I have not had the opportunity to spend the time debugging their test executables. I have access to the scripts, and I do what I can.

What makes you sure that you're getting stuck in the open statement? (Showing us some code around the open statement might help.)

The following code is a cut from the script:

        open(STDOUT, "> $l_cqr_std_output_dir\\cqr_out_$l_counter_x.tx
+t");
        $l_proc_id = open ($handleName, "| $command ");
        print STDOUT "CQRD Process ID: [".$l_proc_id."]\n";

[download]

The results when it fails (which is only fairly occasionally) is that the output log file created by the first line is created, but the print line is never executed, and the script hangs. If you find the rogue process created by the open command and terminate it using the Task Manager, the script recovers, and the output log file shows the process ID of the CQRD that you just terminated.

or that you are trying to run 30 instances of the same piece of crap

Bingo.

Don't some OS's have a problem with opening too many file handles?

It seems to work fine unless the errant process has a problem on startup. While I can't completely discount the possibility that Windows is jamming its head firmly into something unholy, I think it's unlikely this time.

Cheers
Mike

In reply to Re: Re: When starting a process, at what point does "open()" return? by tid
in thread When starting a process, at what point does "open()" return? by tid

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