Fellow monks,

I am writing some code where I have two processes created using fork() which communicate via sockets. I need to have only one of those processes execute functions, but the call to those functions may come from either process. So, I am trying to come up with a scheme to pass a function call, along with all arguments, from one process to the other via the socket. Here's what I have so far:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Socket;
use IO::Handle;
use Data::Dumper;

socketpair(WORKER_SOCKET, GUI_SOCKET, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC)
+ || die "socketpair: $!";
WORKER_SOCKET->autoflush(1);
GUI_SOCKET->autoflush(1);

if (my $pid = fork()) {
    close GUI_SOCKET;
    
    my $line = <WORKER_SOCKET>;
    if ($line =~ /^EXECUTE:(.*)$/)
    {
        # my $fx = "extracted function name";
        # my @args = "extracted args"
        &{\&{$fx}}(@args);
    }
}
else
{
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    close WORKER_SOCKET;
    
    # redirect the STDOUT of the WORKER script to GUI (and main Bacnet
+Tool
    # communication) process.
    STDOUT->autoflush(1);

    my $a = 'baz';
    my @b = qw(foo bar);
    my $c = \@b;
    
    print GUI_SOCKET "EXECUTE:doit($a, @b, $c)\n";
}

sub doit {
    my @q = @_;
    print "\nDoing it " . Dumper(\@q);
}
[download]

I have tried using the FreezeThaw module to serialize/deserialize the arguments on opposite sides of the socket. However, this does not work for arguments that are references, such as the 3rd argument in my example. Any ideas how else I can make such a remote function call