Another way to run applications instead of using exec or fork is to use expect; from the Expect module.
This is very useful for unruly programs that cause your Perl to hang.
I have also used open3 instead of fork / exec but am now currently converting open3 to expect. #Even though it only is available for linux it might be useful to you.
Everything I know is here
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Expect.pm/
Some code that uses this
use Expect;
my ($program_name, $login, $sourcefile) = @_;
#spawn program_name using perl expect module
my $exp = Expect->spawn($program_name,$login)
or die "Cannot spawn $program_name $login: $!\n";
#turn off output of results from stdout
$exp->log_stdout(0);
# wait for program_name to initialise
$exp->expect(600,[ qr/Program ready to start/]);
# send appropriate command to program_name
$exp->send("run program_name $report_name $output_format $source
+file \n");
# Wait for report to run or generate an error
$exp->expect(600,[ qr/Error/i, sub { my $self = shift;
$self->send("quit\n");
print ("perl_program.pl has found an error:
+ $_ \n");
exp_continue; }],
[ qr/Report run successful./i, sub { my $self = shift;
$self->send("quit\n");
exp_continue; }]);
}
