I’m not sure I understand the problem — especially as you neither show the code you’ve tried nor indicate how it is failing. However...

My code is able to pipe scalars from the child to the parent with no problem

Well, serializing your data structure using Data::Dumper produces a string, which is a scalar, so there should be no difficulty in getting this to work with your existing pipe. But...

these serialized references are unable to be piped

Two possibilities come to mind:

  1. You may need to adjust the settings for $Data::Dumper::Deepcopy and/or $Data::Dumper::Purity if your structure contains cross-references.
  2. You may have a deadlock, as explained in the 2009 post Re: Issue with communication of large data between Parent and child using Perl pipes.

I suspect that a deadlock is the more likely problem. See the referenced post for the solution (viz., run the processes asynchronously). Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

In reply to Re: Pipe Complex Data Structure by Athanasius
in thread Pipe Complex Data Structure by Anonymous Monk

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