I want to create a simple IO object that represents a pipe opened to another program to that I can periodically write to another program's STDIN as my app runs. I want it to be bullet-proof (in that it catches all errors) and cross-platform. The best options I can find are:

open

sub io_read {
    local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub { }; # Silence warning.
    open my $pipe, '|-', @_ or die "Cannot exec $_[0]: $!\n";
    return $pipe;
}
[download]

Advantages:

• Cross-platform
• Simple

Disadvantages

• No $SIG{PIPE} to catch errors from the piped program
• Are other errors caught?

IO::Pipe

sub io_read {
    IO::Pipe->reader(@_);
}
[download]

Advantages:

• Simple
• Returns an IO::Handle object for OO interface
• Supported by the Perl core.

Disadvantages

• Still No $SIG{PIPE} to catch errors from the piped program
• Not supported on Win32 (or, at least, its tests are skipped)

IPC::Run

There is no interface for writing to a file handle in IPC::Run, only appending to a scalar. This seems…weird.

IPC::Run3

No file handle interface here, either. I could use a code reference, which would be called repeatedly to spool to the child, but looking at the source code, it appears that it actually writes to a temporary file, and then opens it and spools its contents to the pipe'd command's STDIN. Wha?

IPC::Cmd

Still no file handle interface.

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What am I missing here? It seems as if this should be a solved problem, and I'm kind of stunned that it's not. IO::Pipe comes closest to what I want, but the lack of $SIG{PIPE} error handling and the lack of support for Windows is distressing. Where is the piping module that will JDWIM?

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