This is driving me crazy, and I'm hoping someone can offer up a good alternative.

My problem: I have a perl script that is a test harness. It starts up some clients using fork/exec and then does stuff. This much all works great. Now there is a new requirement. I need to start a matlab RMI server, which is essentially just calling java with the matlab class. The problem is there isn't a graceful way to shutdown the matlab server, you have to kill it. Perl under windows doesn't return a true pid when it forks, and it changes upon exec anyway. My solution was to use Win32::OLE and access the process info. Since it's possible there will be other java processes running I tried to find the pid's of all the java.exe processes and save them. I then fork/exec the rmi server, and look again to find the new java process. However if you have Win32::OLE in your script and fork it throws an unhandled exception. There was a bug filed against Active perl about this back in 2005, but it's clearly not fixed yet.

I tried various methods of load win32::ole, do my thing, unload it, and load it again for the second pid scrape, but its just not working.

Here's the most recent iteration of the code: 

sub scrape_java_pids
{
  use Win32::OLE;
  my $CLASS = "winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}\\\\.\\Root\\c
+imv2";
  my $WMI = Win32::OLE->GetObject( $CLASS ) || die "Error - failed to 
+instantiate Win32::OLE object: $!\n";
  my %jpid;
  foreach my $Proc ( $WMI->ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHER
+E Name = 'java.exe'") )
  {
    $jpid{ $Proc->{ProcessID} } = 1;
  }
  Symbol::delete_package("Win32::OLE");  # fork & win32::ole don't pla
+y nicely.
  delete $INC{'Win32/OLE.pm'};
  $WMI="";
  return %jpid;
}

[download]
There has got to be a better way to do this.

In reply to Windows + Win32::OLE + fork = Hell by UnstoppableDrew

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