Esteemed Monks,

I have some code along the lines of: 

$path = "/var/tmp/decode1";
opendir(DIR, $path);
@files = grep { /\.dat$/ } readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

foreach $file (@files) {
  open(INPUT, "$path/$file") or die "can't open file $file: $!";

  # do some stuff

  close INPUT;
}

[download]
If I have ~20 files in this directory no problem. But when I work on the order of a couple thousand files I reach my system limit.

Shouldn't the close, close the file descriptor, then when it loops to my next file, open a new file handle? I'm not explicitly forking. I would think that I'm only working on 1 file at a time. (Not all 1000 of them.) I guess this is not the case.

So instead of trying to use threading (which I couldn't get to work properly.), should I just fork children myself then wait for the child to come back? All I want to do is work on one file at a time in a directory of my choice.

TIA

In reply to Question on fork and close. by sbank

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