Re^3: Synchronizing STDERR and STDOUT

You can split the fork and the exec up if open mashes them together too much.

pipe CHILDREAD, CHILWRITE;
defined( my $pid = fork ) or die "fork: $!";
if ( $pid ) {
    # read on CHILDREAD;
} else {
    open STDERR, ">&CHILDWRITE";
    open STDOUT, ">&CHILDWRITE";
    exec( $somecmd );
}
[download]

This is precisely the type of plumbing that a shell will do when you say 2>&1, except without the unportable syntax ;-)

That said, IPC::Run and friends already abstract all of this out, so there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

-nuffin
zz zZ Z Z #!perl

Comment on Re^3: Synchronizing STDERR and STDOUT Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Synchronizing STDERR and STDOUT by Ovid (Cardinal) on Sep 21, 2006 at 11:12 UTC
Forking isn't portable. Windows only emulates it and it doesn't always do this well. Update: Also, I don't believe this guarantees that the streams will remain in synch. I've had plenty of problems with `Test::Builder` output getting corrupted when `Test::Harness` spits it out and if they must be completely in synch or my code fails. Cheers, Ovid New address of my CGI Course.	[reply]
Re^5: Synchronizing STDERR and STDOUT by nothingmuch (Priest) on Sep 21, 2006 at 11:20 UTC
You missed my point. The shell will simply do a dup of `2>&1` like i illustrated. The problem is not in the fork, etc, but in that the sugar layer to do this dup, namely `2>&1` involves reparsing the command line, etc, and is thus undesirable and unportable. Instead of staying one level above backticks and shell redirects, you can simply do what they do. As for fork vs no fork - look at how IPC::Run does it. It's portable to windows and supports redirects. WRT synching - i am not sure (this may be impl dependant) but if there are two separate buffers for the predupped handled then they won't be in synch unless you auto flush in the child. If two dupped file descriptors will share a buffer then they will be completely synchronized, and in either case this is not going to be any different than what `2>&1` will give you. -nuffin zz zZ Z Z #!perl	[reply] [d/l] [select]