synopsis of IPC::Open3

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

Can someone explain the following lines of the IPC::Open3 synopsis:

$pid = open3(\*CHLD_IN, \*CHLD_OUT, \*CHLD_ERR,            'some cmd a
+nd args', 'optarg', ...);
use Symbol 'gensym'; $err = gensym;
[download]

I am using open3 to execute a shell command but I am getting a "fork: resource temporarily unavailable error" and I believe it may be due to not using these lines in my open3 routine. Any insight would be very much appreciated!

Comment on synopsis of IPC::Open3 Download Code

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Re: synopsis of IPC::Open3 by salva (Canon) on Feb 28, 2011 at 15:23 UTC
Let us really help you posting your program code! Anyway, try using `strace` to discover what is going wrong at the OS level.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: synopsis of IPC::Open3 by ikegami (Patriarch) on Feb 28, 2011 at 16:57 UTC
`\*CHLD_ERR` and `$err = gensym` are two ways of creating a file handle to pass to `open3`. It makes no sense to use both. And it's not the cause of your problem.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: synopsis of IPC::Open3 by tilly (Archbishop) on Feb 28, 2011 at 18:11 UTC
My educated guess is that the OP has accidentally written a fork bomb, and is noticing the error message from running out of processes.	[reply]