I am trying to have STDOUT/STDERR from a exec'ed child process go back to the parent via a pipe in Perl. The closest I have seen to what I want to do is at :
http://forums.devshed.com/perl-programming-6/exec-and-redirecting-stdout-stderr-168501.html
The following is a stripped down example of what I am trying to do. I also tried a variant of the link above. I can't see what I'm doing wrong...
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict ;
use warnings ;
my $cmd = "/usr/bin/who -a" ; # anything to stdout
pipe( READER, WRITER ) ;
my $child = fork() ;
if ( $child ) {
print "I am the parent: My pid = $$ junior = $child\n" ;
close( WRITER ) ;
my @output = <READER> ;
print @output ;
print "parent is DONE\n" ;
} else {
print "I am the child. My pid = $$\n" ;
close( READER ) ;
close( STDOUT );
close( STDERR );
*STDOUT = *WRITER ;
*STDERR = *WRITER ;
print WRITER "XXX ouput before exec....\n" ;
exec( $cmd ) or exit(1) ;
}
It's not possible to redirect file descriptors just with assignments. Rather one needs to use open
like described in perldoc -f open
. In your case the child code would look like this:
print "I am the child. My pid = $$\n" ;
close( READER ) ;
open STDOUT, ">&", \*WRITER or die $!;
open STDERR, ">&", \*WRITER or die $!;
print WRITER "XXX ouput before exec....\n" ;
exec( $cmd ) or exit(1) ;
Slaven Rezic has the right answer to why your code doesn't work, but you should also be aware of a shortcut that you can use. The special pipe+fork open READER, '-|'
does almost all the setup work for you, creating a child process with its STDOUT
writing into a pipe that the parent can read with READER
. That just leaves the STDERR
redirection for you to do manually.
The shortened version of the code looks like this:
my $child = open READER, '-|';
defined $child or die "pipe/fork: $!\n";
if ( $child ) {
print "I am the parent: My pid = $$ junior = $child\n" ;
my @output = <READER> ;
print @output ;
print "parent is DONE\n" ;
} else {
print "I am the child. My pid = $$\n" ;
open STDERR, '>&STDOUT';
print "XXX ouput before exec....\n" ;
exec( $cmd ) or exit(1) ;
}
This code is another way to pipe the STDOUT and STDERR from the child process.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict ;
use warnings;
my $cmd = "/usr/bin/who -a" ; # anything to stdout
pipe( READER, WRITER ) ;
my $child = fork() ;
if ( $child ) {
print "I am the parent: My pid = $$ junior = $child\n" ;
close( WRITER ) ;
my @output = <READER> ;
print @output ;
print "parent is DONE\n" ;
} else {
print "I am the child. My pid = $$\n" ;
close( READER ) ;
open(STDERR,">&", WRITER) or die "Cannot duplicate STDERR;
open(STDOUT,">&", WRITER) or die "cannot duplicate STDOUT";
print WRITER "XXX ouput before exec....\n" ;
exec( $cmd ) or exit(1) ;
}