Greetings Monks, I know that this is a silly question, but we are pressed for time and I wanted to draw on your experience. So here are the details:

We are writing a test script as part of a porting effort. We need to perform the following:

Open a program and
1. read its STDOUT
2. calculate its system time
3. calculate its max memory
4. kill it if the script is Control-C'd

Here are the caveats: it has to be Unix/Win portable and can not use any non-core modules.

So, we use open(PROG,"pogname|") to open the program with a handle to its stdout. We install a signal-handler to deal with keyboard interupts. Fine. But how do we kill a program started by 'open' from the signal handler? Simply closing the filehandle is not enough.

To get the system time, we use 'times' as such:

($user,$system,$cuser,$csystem) = times;

It seems to me that the program started with 'open' should be our child, but $cuser & $csystem are zero. Does this only work when you have forked a child?

As for the max memory issue, I could scan the ps table, but this is not portable. I am at a loss here.

I know that this is actually several questions. I am also painfully aware that there is no easy answer, but I will be happy to consider any advise you might have to offer.

"Never take yourself too seriously, because everyone knows that fat birds dont fly" -FLC

In reply to Portable Process Control by scmason

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