duping a filehandle

smackdab has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am writing a script that will parse different types of log files and I want to have a template for the different log files...So I thought the main program would open a log file, I would then call each template and it would make a copy of the filehandle (instead of a new open) and then read the header and determine if it was for that template to handle...

use strict; use warnings;

sub GetLogHeader
{
    open(TEMPLOG, "<&LOG");
    while (my $row = <TEMPLOG>)
    {
        print "$row\n"; last;
    }
    close(TEMPLOG);
}

my $abc;
open(LOG, "c:\\log.log") || die;

$abc = <LOG>;
my $header = GetLogHeader(\*LOG);
$abc = <LOG>;
$abc = <LOG>;
[download]

Basically I can't figure out how to pass a filehandle and then copy it. I expect that the copy can move the filepointer w/o affecting the original filehandle, but I can't really figure that out either...In this test, it seems that LOG and TEMPLOG are equal and I really want them to be able to point to different parts of the log file... I am just getting back in to Perl and am quite rusty ;-)

Comment on duping a filehandle Download Code

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Re: duping a filehandle by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 14, 2007 at 03:58 UTC
From the man page for `dup` (on FreeBSD): The object referenced by the descriptor does not distinguish between oldd and newd in any way. Thus if newd and oldd are duplicate references to an open file, read(2), write(2) and lseek(2) calls all move a single pointer into the file, and append mode, non-blocking I/O and asynchronous I/O options are shared between the references. If a separate pointer into the file is desired, a different object reference to the file must be obtained by issuing an additional open(2) system call. The close-on- exec flag on the new file descriptor is unset. (Emphasis mine) Look into `tell` + `seek` instead of `dup`ing.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: duping a filehandle by smackdab (Pilgrim) on Jan 14, 2007 at 05:02 UTC
THANKS!!! I wish I knew unix better...I found a "seek($fh_log, 0, 0);" before returning from my subroutine put the filepointer back at the top, so all is good!	[reply]
Re^3: duping a filehandle by ysth (Canon) on Jan 14, 2007 at 22:38 UTC
Alternatively, pass just the filename to your sub and open it there using a different file handle (preferably lexical). I'm looking for a job.	[reply]