A die() occurring within a forked child process will get caught by a containing eval block in the parent.

This is incorrect. I ran your test program and I didn't see anything to idicate that you are correct. Here's the output I saw: 

(PID 20379) Beginning transaction #123  at foo.pl line 6.
        (the child fails) at foo.pl line 13.
(PID 20380) Rolling back transaction #123: died in eval with Child pro
+cess failure at foo.pl line 14.
        (the parent does OK) at foo.pl line 10.
(PID 20379) Committing transaction #123 at foo.pl line 21.

[download]

Clearly the eval{} is catching the die() within the child, not the parent.

However, the general thrust of your post is quite correct: it is very bad for a module to fork() and not document that fact. Debugging a fork gone wrong can be very hard, particularly if you don't know a fork() might have happened!

-sam

In reply to Re: forked die() in eval block has counterintuitive behavior? by samtregar
in thread forked die() in eval block has counterintuitive behavior? by rlucas

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.