Perl Cookbook

Communicating Between Related Processes

Problem

You have two related processes that need to communicate, and you need better control than you can get from open, system, and backticks.

Solution

Use pipe and then fork:

pipe(READER, WRITER);
if (fork) {
    # run parent code, either reading or writing, not both
} else {
    # run child code, either reading or writing, not both
}

Or use a special forking form of open:

if ($pid = open(CHILD, "|-")) {
        # run parent code, writing to child
} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    # otherwise run child code here, reading from parent
}

Or, going the other way:

if ($pid = open(CHILD, "-|")) {
    # run parent code, reading from child
} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    # otherwise run child code here, writing to parent
}

Discussion

Pipes are simply two connected filehandles, where data written to one filehandle can be read by the other. The pipe function creates two filehandles linked in this way, one writable and one readable. Even though you can’t take two already existing filehandles and link them, pipe can be used for communication between processes. One process creates a pair of filehandles with the pipe functions, then forks off a child, resulting in two distinct processes both running in the same program, each with a copy of the connected filehandles.

It doesn’t matter which process is the reader and which is the writer, so long as one of them takes one role and its peer process takes the other. You can only have one-way communication. ...