http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=171962
Description: The parent pid sends a string to the child pid, which the child prints out. The child then sleeps for 2 seconds before sending a string to the parent. Instead of locking up completaly the parent prints "Waiting...\n" until there is input for it to read.

I wrote this to encorperate it into a larger Tk script which I don't want freezing when it forks off to download information.

NOTE: This does not work on Windows (hence the name "Unix Sockets")!

The code is a based on of "pipe2" from perlipc. See also: IO::Socket, IO::Select, and perlipc.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use strict;
use Socket;
use IO::Socket;
use IO::Select;

socketpair(CHILD, PARENT, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC)
    or die "socketpair: $!";
    
CHILD->autoflush(1);
PARENT->autoflush(1);

my $pid;
my $s = IO::Select->new();
$s->add(\*CHILD);


if ( $pid = fork ) {
    close PARENT;
    print CHILD "Parent Pid $$ is sending this\n";
    #chomp(my $line = <CHILD>);
    my $line;
    while ( 1 ) {
        if ( $s->can_read(0) ) {
            foreach my $handle ( $s->can_read(0) ) {
                recv($handle, $line, 1024, 0);
            }
            last;
        }
        print "Waiting...\n";
    }
    chomp $line;
    print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: '$line'\n";
    close CHILD;
    waitpid($pid, 0);
} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    close CHILD;
    chomp(my $line = <PARENT>);
    print "Child Pid $$ just read this: '$line'\n";
    sleep 2;
    print PARENT "Child Pid $$ is sending this\n";
    close PARENT;
    exit;
}
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Non-Blocking Bidirectional Communication using Unix Sockets
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 09, 2015 at 20:57 UTC
    You keep using that word "non-blocking."
    I do not think it means what you think it means.

    perldoc -f sysread
    perldoc -f syswrite