use IPC::Open2;
$pid = open2(\*RDR, \*WTR, 'some cmd and args');
# or
$pid = open2(\*RDR, \*WTR, 'some', 'cmd', 'and', 'args');
open2 function spawns the given $cmd and
connects $rdr for reading and $wtr for writing.
It's what you think should work when you try
open(HANDLE, "|cmd args|");
The write filehandle will have autoflush turned on.
If $rdr is a string (that is, a bareword filehandle rather than a glob or a reference) and it begins with ``>&'', then the child will send output directly to that file handle. If $wtr is a string that begins with ``<&'', then
WTR will be closed in the parent, and the child will read from it directly. In both cases, there will be a dup instead of a pipe made.
open2 returns the process
ID of the child process. It doesn't return on failure:
it just raises an exception matching /^open2:/.
Additionally, this is very dangerous as you may block forever. It assumes it's going to talk to something like bc, both writing to it and reading from it. This is presumably safe because you ``know'' that commands like bc will read a line at a time and output a line at a time. Programs like sort that read their entire input stream first, however, are quite apt to cause deadlock.
The big problem with this approach is that if you don't have control over
source code being run in the the child process, you can't control what it
does with pipe buffering. Thus you can't just open a pipe to cat -v and continually read and write a line from it.
open3.