Ok, I have fork working on win32. That's no problem. I downloaded the right version (5.6.0 bld 623) from activestate and fork works great. I even have it working with LWP so I can get a page in a child process and not interfere with the parent. The only problem is, when I try to exit the child, it wants to destroy something in the parent that is related to Tk. I do know that I want to use POSIX::exit(0) or just CORE::exit(0) but those have the same problem as just calling exit.

If I don't create a MainWindow, and just do a regular non gui perl script on windows, it works great to go get a web page in the background. See below. If you uncomment out the MainWindow creation line below though, it fails on the exit of the child and gives the error:

Attempt to free non-existent shared string at Widget.pm line 96 during global destruction

Here is the code: 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl 

use POSIX;
use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
use Tk;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use URI::URL;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
#my $mw = MainWindow->new();
 
if (!($pid = fork))
{
   $url = 'http://www.worldmusic.de/perl/dclpc-faq.html';
   $file = 'web.txt';
   my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
   $req->header('Accept' => 'text/html');
   $res = $ua->request($req, $file);
   print "hi there, i'm a child about to exit\n";
   POSIX::exit(0);
}

print "i'm the parent about to mainloop\n";

foreach $i (0..3) {
   sleep 4;
   print "i'm the parent about to mainloop\n";
}

MainLoop;

[download]
Thanks for any help!!! Justin Eltoft

In reply to fork, tk, win32 by Eradicatore

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