This manual page is for Mac OS X version 10.6

Reading manual pages

IPC::Open3(3pm)                       Perl Programmers Reference Guide                       IPC::Open3(3pm)



NAME
       IPC::Open3, open3 - open a process for reading, writing, and error handling

SYNOPSIS
           $pid = open3(\*CHLD_IN, \*CHLD_OUT, \*CHLD_ERR,
                           'some cmd and args', 'optarg', ...);

           my($wtr, $rdr, $err);
           $pid = open3($wtr, $rdr, $err,
                           'some cmd and args', 'optarg', ...);

DESCRIPTION
       Extremely similar to open2(), open3() spawns the given $cmd and connects CHLD_OUT for reading from
       the child, CHLD_IN for writing to the child, and CHLD_ERR for errors.  If CHLD_ERR is false, or the
       same file descriptor as CHLD_OUT, then STDOUT and STDERR of the child are on the same filehandle.
       The CHLD_IN will have autoflush turned on.

       If CHLD_IN begins with "<&", then CHLD_IN will be closed in the parent, and the child will read from
       it directly.  If CHLD_OUT or CHLD_ERR begins with ">&", then the child will send output directly to
       that filehandle.  In both cases, there will be a dup(2) instead of a pipe(2) made.

       If either reader or writer is the null string, this will be replaced by an autogenerated filehandle.
       If so, you must pass a valid lvalue in the parameter slot so it can be overwritten in the caller, or
       an exception will be raised.

       The filehandles may also be integers, in which case they are understood as file descriptors.

       open3() returns the process ID of the child process.  It doesn't return on failure: it just raises an
       exception matching "/^open3:/".  However, "exec" failures in the child (such as no such file or
       permission denied), are just reported to CHLD_ERR, as it is not possible to trap them.

       If the child process dies for any reason, the next write to CHLD_IN is likely to generate a SIGPIPE
       in the parent, which is fatal by default.  So you may wish to handle this signal.

       Note if you specify "-" as the command, in an analogous fashion to "open(FOO, "-|")" the child
       process will just be the forked Perl process rather than an external command.  This feature isn't yet
       supported on Win32 platforms.

       open3() does not wait for and reap the child process after it exits.  Except for short programs where
       it's acceptable to let the operating system take care of this, you need to do this yourself.  This is
       normally as simple as calling "waitpid $pid, 0" when you're done with the process.  Failing to do
       this can result in an accumulation of defunct or "zombie" processes.  See "waitpid" in perlfunc for
       more information.

       If you try to read from the child's stdout writer and their stderr writer, you'll have problems with
       blocking, which means you'll want to use select() or the IO::Select, which means you'd best use
       sysread() instead of readline() for normal stuff.

       This is very dangerous, as you may block forever.  It assumes it's going to talk to something like
       bc, both writing to it and reading from it.  This is presumably safe because you "know" that commands
       like bc will read a line at a time and output a line at a time.  Programs like sort that read their
       entire input stream first, however, are quite apt to cause deadlock.

       The big problem with this approach is that if you don't have control over source code being run in
       the child process, you can't control what it does with pipe buffering.  Thus you can't just open a
       pipe to "cat -v" and continually read and write a line from it.

See Also
       IPC::Open2
           Like Open3 but without STDERR catpure.

       IPC::Run
           This is a CPAN module that has better error handling and more facilities than Open3.

WARNING
       The order of arguments differs from that of open2().



perl v5.10.0                                     2007-12-18                                  IPC::Open3(3pm)