I have a perl app that has a couple of functions which take a very long time to complete. I would like to be able to essentially throw these functions into the background (maybe not literally, but figuratively) and still be able to give periodic updates to another process (through a socket that I have open). This sounds kind of convoluted, so I'll give a simplified example. (Note, this isn't the actual app, so don't worry about specifics, typos or if the socket connection fails). 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use IO::Socket;
use strict;

#sock is my connection where I report what is going on
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => 'hostname.org',
                                        PeerPort => '1234',
                                        Proto => 'tcp'
                                        );

my $return_value = long_running_function();

print $sock "$return_value\n";
close $sock;

[download]


Now, I'd like to be able to have the long_running_function run, while I still have the ability to communicate on the socket. I'm wanting to send an "I'm still here" to the other end of the socket every 2-3 minutes, while I'm waiting for the long_running_function to finish processing (which can take up to an hour to complete). I've been racking my brain on this, and cannot really figure out a clean way to do this. I thought about using fork, but I'm not sure there isn't a simpler way I'm just overlooking.

This app is running on the win32 platform, though the other end of the socket is FreeBSD (not that the other end should matter).

Any good ideas?

In reply to How to break up a long running process by markh

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