One solution is to use a many-to-one pipe. That involves some manipulation of duplicated handles in the child process, so you'll have to call fork instead of magic open.
After preliminaries,
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
we'll define some subroutiness to act as children and open a single pipe.
my @kids = (
sub { print "First!", $/; },
sub { print "Second!", $/; },
sub { print "Third!", $/; },
);
pipe my ($in, $out);
Now we start breeding children. Each will close the $in handle, select the $out handle as the default, set up autoflush on it, and then call their sub. We definitely need to prevent zombies, since the kids will all finish before the parent does, so we start by declaring a hash where we will keep their pid's.
my %kid;
for (@kids) {
my $cpid = fork;
defined $cpid or warn("Couldn't fork"), next;
$cpid or do { # child
close $in or die $!;
select $out;
$| = 1;
$_->();
exit 0;
};
$kid{$cpid} = undef;
}
The select statement is the one-arg kind, which windows should handle ok. Back in the parent, now, we have an unwanted $out handle, a single $in handle that the kids are all fighting to talk on, and a hash to remind us of the kids' names. Wrapping up, we close $out, listen to the kids in turn, decorate their messages to show who's repeating them, and finally call wait enough times to bury them all safely. We must be careful not to die before that.
close $out or warn $!;
s/.$/??? says the child/, print while <$in>;
delete $kid{+wait} while %kid;
Many-to-one pipes like this will keep their messages' integrity in flush-sized chunks. So long as they are shorter than than an I/O buffer and end with $/, they will be read as distinct. You may want to have the kids tag their messages to identify the source.
I've tested this on Windows XP and Linux. It works on both.
| [reply]
[d/l]
[select] |
| [reply] |
What alternative are you looking for?
Rather than asking for an alternative, why not post the code that you are having problems with, and let us help you correct it?
Examine what is said, not who speaks.
Silence betokens consent.
Love the truth but pardon error.
| [reply] |
Hello,
With Perl 5.8 you could use Win32::Job .
It enables you to redirect the stdin of a child process .
ZlR.
| [reply] |
I don't know if it will help you or not, but IPC::Run is supposed to work well on MSWindows. Maybe you could use that?
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
flash japh
| [reply] |