Two problems with this.

First, the HUP signal might not be delivered one-to-one. Since the "notify the process that HUP has been received" is just a one-bit value in the process table, if the process doesn't get woken up quickly enough, two HUPs will be delivered as only one hit.

Second, if you kill the child process before reading the names, you might not actually get to read the names, because that will all depend on buffering and flushing and such.

Thus, I suggest you merely use an ordinary loop, and when you've read the Nth name, just close the handle. On the next write, the child will die anyway. If you really want to optimize that, read in the loop, and then kill the child when you've already read the name.

Or, just write the loop using File::Find (no child process), because I bet that will be within striking distance of using the child anyway, and you can get precisely the semantics you want.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

In reply to Re: Another way to avoid File::Find by merlyn
in thread Another way to avoid File::Find by graff

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