I need to portably be able to:

  • Start a process
  • Swallow its output
  • Know if it's still running
  • Kill it
  • Verify that it's dead and gone

    Using fork/exec, kill and waitpid have problems on Windows. IPC::Run and IPC::Open3 deal with spawning and I/O, but don't deal with monitoring and control well. Although an attempt with Open3 solved some spawning issues, either waitpid isn't working or the process isn't dying (perhaps due to pending I/O?).

    I searched perlmonks. The link to STEM gives a blank page. POE seems like overkill (I need to be able to justify inclusion of a package into a corporate distribution). Likewise with Parallel::*.

    Are there any portable approaches I haven't considered, tips to make one of the above approaches work, or should I conditionalize my code to use Win32::Process on Windows?

    In reply to Portable Process Management by srvance

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