IPC::Open2(3)                                                    IPC::Open2(3)



NAME
     IPC::Open2, open2 - open a process for both reading and writing

SYNOPSIS
         use IPC::Open2;
         $pid = open2(\*RDR, \*WTR, 'some cmd and args');
           # or
         $pid = open2(\*RDR, \*WTR, 'some', 'cmd', 'and', 'args');


DESCRIPTION
     The open2() function spawns the given $cmd and connects $rdr for reading
     and $wtr for writing.  It's what you think should work when you try

         open(HANDLE, "|cmd args|");

     The write filehandle will have autoflush turned on.

     If $rdr is a string (that is, a bareword filehandle rather than a glob or
     a reference) and it begins with ">&", then the child will send output
     directly to that file handle.  If $wtr is a string that begins with "<&",
     then WTR will be closed in the parent, and the child will read from it
     directly.  In both cases, there will be a dup(2) instead of a pipe(2)
     made.

     open2() returns the process ID of the child process.  It doesn't return
     on failure: it just raises an exception matching /^open2:/.

WARNING
     It will not create these file handles for you.  You have to do this
     yourself.  So don't pass it empty variables expecting them to get filled
     in for you.

     Additionally, 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
     See the IPC::Open3 manpage for an alternative that handles STDERR as
     well.  This function is really just a wrapper around open3().







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IPC::Open2(3)                                                    IPC::Open2(3)























































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