I don't hope for a good explanation for the following, but maybe someone has already experienced something similar, or has some idea about where I could research for this problem:

We have a Perl application running continuously on Windows XP on several hosts (each running its own copy). One of these copies out of a sudden got "mad", in that EVERY execution of an external program, using qx(), started to fail, while running commands using system() always worked. We could see this from the logfiles (our application does plenty of qx and system calles), and also by other diagnostics. The failure was independent of which command was executed; in fact, we could not see any sign that command execution was started, and $? contained 0xFFFFFFFF afterwards. Other Perl programs on the same host did not have any problem with qx.

I killed this program and restarted it, but the restarted program shows the SAME error right from the beginning.

I then restarted it again (always in the same CMD shell), and now the problem was gone - everything worked like normal.

-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>

In reply to qx(....) suddenly failing by rovf

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.