1. I'd rather not use a solution using external modules, since the collector will have to run on MANY hosts as painlessly and non-intrusively as possible. Is there a high performance approach without external modules?
The modules cited in the code that Thelonius posted (IPC::Open3, IO::Select, Symbol) are not "external", in the sense that they are all included in the standard Perl "core" distribution. That is, wherever a reasonably current version of Perl is installed, these modules are also installed by default.

(If these many hosts you speak of have non-standard or hopelessly outdated perl installations, that's going to be a problem anyway.)

As for buffer size, the 1024 bytes suggested by Thelonius is fine for handling text that must ultimately be treated in a line-oriented fashion; if you're dealing with really high data rates, an 8k buffer should be about optimal.

In reply to Re^3: Redirecting stdout/stderr to pipe by graff
in thread Redirecting stdout/stderr to pipe by 0xbeef

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.