Portable Process Management

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

I need to portably be able to:

Start a process

Swallow its output

Know if it's still running

Kill it

Verify that it's dead and gone

Using fork/exec, kill and waitpid have problems on Windows. IPC::Run and IPC::Open3 deal with spawning and I/O, but don't deal with monitoring and control well. Although an attempt with Open3 solved some spawning issues, either waitpid isn't working or the process isn't dying (perhaps due to pending I/O?).

I searched perlmonks. The link to STEM gives a blank page. POE seems like overkill (I need to be able to justify inclusion of a package into a corporate distribution). Likewise with Parallel::*.

Are there any portable approaches I haven't considered, tips to make one of the above approaches work, or should I conditionalize my code to use Win32::Process on Windows?

Comment on Portable Process Management

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Portable Process Management by erroneousBollock (Curate) on Nov 16, 2007 at 07:18 UTC
I'd love it if someone wrote a "perlish" unified interface for those features. I'd use it all the time. Definitely use Win32::Process and related modules... the fork() emulation just presents too many problems. -David	[reply]
Re: Portable Process Management by cdarke (Prior) on Nov 16, 2007 at 09:33 UTC
Proc::Background Not sure if it meets all your criteria. Might be possible to mod if not.	[reply]
Re^2: Portable Process Management by srvance (Initiate) on Nov 16, 2007 at 23:15 UTC
This looks promising. Handles everything but the I/O requirement, and that can be addressed with the common redirect syntax that Windows added. Steve	[reply]
Re^2: Portable Process Management by srvance (Initiate) on Nov 23, 2007 at 17:44 UTC
Have you tried this on Windows Vista? Test 47 is failing in the same way my original code was failing. I'm going to try some older Windows platforms to decide whether it's Vista or my perl build.	[reply]
Re: Portable Process Management by Anonymous Monk on Nov 16, 2007 at 07:34 UTC
IPC::Run and IPC::Open	[reply]
Re^2: Portable Process Management by erroneousBollock (Curate) on Nov 16, 2007 at 07:37 UTC
Know if it's still running That perhaps implies that IPC::Run may be inappropriate. IPC::Open would definitely be a good place to start. -David	[reply]
Re^3: Portable Process Management by srvance (Initiate) on Nov 16, 2007 at 23:05 UTC
Do you guys mean IPC::Open3? I can't find an IPC::Open on CPAN.	[reply]