I'm writing a daemon on solaris 5.7 with perl 5.005 that processes log files in real time. I thought I'd use a tail -f so I could read the logs while they where being generated. I used an alarm to unblock the read and look around once in a while to see if i should finish reading. The problem is when its time to stop I can't close the file. The close gets blocked because the pipe on the other side isn't finished. Unfortunatly for me it never will so I need some way to cutting it off more forcebly. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get this thing closed? Maby I need a better way of reading the file instead. Help would be very much appreciated. 
open ENSTAIL, "tail +0 -f $ENS_LOG |";
while ( not $done ) {
  eval {
    alarm 60;
    $$line = <ENSTAIL>;
    alarm 0;
    };
  if ($@) {
    if ( finishedReading() ) {
      close ENSTAIL;           # BLOCKED!
      $done = 1;   
      }
    }
  process( $line );
  }

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In reply to blocked close filehandle by Anonymous Monk

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