Hello Monks! I'm trying to write a routine which takes a filehandle of compressed data and returns a filehandle to the uncompressed data. I don't want to use Compress::Zlib because I want to support tzip, bzip2, etc. Here's what I've implemented using open2:

use IPC::Open2;
use FileHandle;

sub decompress_filehandle
{
  my $fh = shift;

  $WRITEHANDLE = new FileHandle();
  $READHANDLE  = new FileHandle();

  $procid = open2($READHANDLE,$WRITEHANDLE,'gzip -cd');
  #$procid = open2($READHANDLE,$WRITEHANDLE,'c:\progra~1\cygwin\bin\gz
+ip.exe -cd');

  die "Couldn't open2: $!\n" unless defined $procid;

  while (<$fh>)
  {
    print $WRITEHANDLE $_;
  }

  close ($WRITEHANDLE) or die "Error in child: $!\n";

  return $READHANDLE;

  # put in END{}?
  # waitpid $pid,0;
}

my $fh = new FileHandle('mailarc-1.txt.gz');
my $dfh = decompress_filehandle($fh);

while(<$dfh>)
{
  print $_;
}

close ($dfh) or die "Error in child: $!\n";
[download]

This works fine on Linux, but hangs on the open2 line with Windows XP, ActiveState perl 5.8.0. I can see gzip is running in task manager. I suspect it's some sort of buffering problem. Can anyone help? As a second attempt, I tried using IPC::Run:

use IPC::Run qw( run );
use FileHandle;

sub decompress_filehandle
{
  my $fh = shift;

  my $out = new FileHandle;

  #run ['gzip','-cd'], $fh, '>pipe', $out;
  run ['c:\progra~1\cygwin\bin\gzip.exe','-cd'], $fh, '>pipe', $out;

  return $out;
}

my $fh = new FileHandle('mailarc-1.txt.gz');
my $dfh = decompress_filehandle($fh);

print $_ while <$dfh>;
[download]

Unfortunately this hangs on both Linux and WinXP. :( Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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