I have a program that opens a Unix pipe (via pipe()), spawns a child process, and sends over a line of characters, terminated by a newline. The spawned child then reads the line from the pipe viw IO::Handle->getline().

This works in 99% of all cases, but I'm seeing sporadic failures under load and long lines (haven't been able to reproduce it in a standalone script) where IO::Handle->getline() from the pipe will not return all that has been stuffed into the pipe until the newline, but stops at 73,728 bytes which seems to be the pipe's capacity (google the number).

Are there situations where getline() (which seems to map into a scalar read from <fh>) won't read until a newline and there's no EOF either, but a momentary pipe clog?

I'm using IO::Handle 1.28 and perl 5.14.2, were there fixes for this issue that I overlooked when I briefly viewed the core changes?