in reply to Client socket blocks if server creates subprocess

Just a theory, but the normal rule when a process forks, is that both children inherit all open file handles, including sockets, so if your parent process forks while it holds a socket connection to your child, then your child will block if either side of that fork fails to close the socket.

In addition, you say that you are seeing strange behaviour on windows. I to have seen perl under windows do all kinds of strange things with sockets in the past, to the extent that I would now not trust windows to have a reliable implementation.

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Re^2: Client socket blocks if server creates subprocess
by raandom (Acolyte) on Dec 06, 2010 at 08:44 UTC
    I have the same opinion but still can not make it working. Pre-fork with socket close also will not help: 
    # Workaround for Windows (will not help):
my $h = fork();
if (defined $h and $h == 0) {
    # child
    close($client);
    system($cmd);
    exit(0);
}

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