Piped input read by Windows Vista but not by Windows XP

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

I have AS Perl 5.8.9 (build 827) on Windows Vista and Windows XP. Piped input is read by the Perl program on Vista but is not read by the same Perl program on XP, even though Perl programs can be run implicitly on both Vista and XP by just entering the program name on the command line.

Following is the command line I am using and the Perl program I am piping input to. This is a simplified example to show the difference between how Vista and XP handle piped input. I am grepping all lines of a file (the test program in this case, but it could be any file) with the '-n' option to precede each line with a line number and colon. The output of grep is piped to the Perl program where the colon following the line number is removed and the line is printed.

Note: I found that if I use '... | perl test.pl' instead of '... | test.pl' on XP it will read the piped input, but I do not believe I should have to do that to make it work. Does anyone have any ideas why piped input is not read on XP? Thanks.

grep -n "^" test.pl | test.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Perl program test.pl
use strict;
use warnings;

while ( <> ) {
   chomp;
   s/:/ /;
   print "$_\n";
}
[download]

"Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."

Comment on Piped input read by Windows Vista but not by Windows XP Download Code

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Re: Piped input read by Windows Vista but not by Windows XP by kcott (Archbishop) on Nov 01, 2010 at 23:29 UTC
While I can't give you an answer as to why, I can confirm this behaviour. I first tried your code on cygwin: pipe worked fine. Then tried with XP (using same code and running from the same directory): got the same as you. Furthermore, taking the input from stdin rather than pipe worked fine. Here's my tests: ken@Miranda ~/c/_/tmp $ cat > xp_pipe_prob.pl #!perl use strict; use warnings; while (<>) { chomp; s/:/ /; print "$_\n"; } ken@Miranda ~/c/_/tmp $ echo 'fred:derf' fred:derf ken@Miranda ~/c/_/tmp $ chmod +x xp_pipe_prob.pl ken@Miranda ~/c/_/tmp $ echo 'fred:derf' \| xp_pipe_prob.pl fred derf ken@Miranda ~/c/_/tmp $ Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\_\tmp>echo 'fred:derf' 'fred:derf' C:\_\tmp>echo 'fred:derf' \| xp_pipe_prob.pl C:\_\tmp>echo 'fred:derf' \| perl xp_pipe_prob.pl 'fred derf' C:\_\tmp>xp_pipe_prob.pl fred:derf fred derf C:\_\tmp> [download] -- Ken	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Piped input read by Windows Vista but not by Windows XP by Anonymous Monk on Nov 02, 2010 at 00:12 UTC
That is an old cmd.exe limitation, maybe cmd powershell is different? Anyway, use pl2bat because apparently cmd.exe will only pipe to programs/batch files, it considers everything else just files ?node_id=3989;HIT=win%20pipe;re=N pipe to script requires '\| perl' on win32	[reply]
Re^2: Piped input read by Windows Vista but not by Windows XP by roho (Bishop) on Nov 02, 2010 at 00:21 UTC
Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense now. Too bad M$ never got around to fixing this in XP. "Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."	[reply]
Re^3: Piped input read by Windows Vista but not by Windows XP (mostly fixed) by tye (Sage) on Nov 02, 2010 at 00:37 UTC
It has been fixed in most cases for a long time. See Re: Out of date over <> and 5.10 (redir) for more about it. Still, nobody has been able to demonstrate what causes only some instances to exhibit this problem. - tye	[reply]