Hi,

Thanks for the responses. The os is mac osx 10.4.11.

It doesn't seem like a buffering problem to me. If the child actually finished executing, then wouldn't the close() execute on the output file handle, thus flushing the buffer to the file?

Here is what happens when I turn on autoflush for the output filehandle:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

my $child_pid = fork;
$| = 1;

if (!defined $child_pid) {
    say "**My error**: couldn't fork: $!";
}

if ($child_pid) { #then in parent
    say "in parent...";
    sleep 1;
}
else { #then in child
    open my $OUTFILE, '>', 'data1.txt'
        or die "**My error: couldn't open data1.txt: $!";

    my $old = select $OUTFILE;
    $| = 1;
    select $old;
    

    for (1 .. 10) {
        say $OUTFILE $_;
        sleep 2;
    }

    close $OUTFILE;
}

[download]
--output:--
$ perl 1perl.pl 
in parent...
$ cat data1.txt
1
2
$

[download]

In reply to Re: fork(): when parent exits, what happens to child? by 7stud
in thread fork(): when parent exits, what happens to child? by 7stud

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.