MirBSD manpage: perlfork(1)


PERLFORK(1)     Perl Programmers Reference Guide      PERLFORK(1)

NAME

     perlfork - Perl's fork() emulation

SYNOPSIS

         NOTE:  As of the 5.8.0 release, fork() emulation has considerably
         matured.  However, there are still a few known bugs and differences
         from real fork() that might affect you.  See the "BUGS" and
         "CAVEATS AND LIMITATIONS" sections below.

     Perl provides a fork() keyword that corresponds to the Unix
     system call of the same name.  On most Unix-like platforms
     where the fork() system call is available, Perl's fork()
     simply calls it.

     On some platforms such as Windows where the fork() system
     call is not available, Perl can be built to emulate fork()
     at the interpreter level. While the emulation is designed to
     be as compatible as possible with the real fork() at the
     level of the Perl program, there are certain important
     differences that stem from the fact that all the pseudo
     child "processes" created this way live in the same real
     process as far as the operating system is concerned.

     This document provides a general overview of the capabili-
     ties and limitations of the fork() emulation.  Note that the
     issues discussed here are not applicable to platforms where
     a real fork() is available and Perl has been configured to
     use it.

DESCRIPTION

     The fork() emulation is implemented at the level of the Perl
     interpreter. What this means in general is that running
     fork() will actually clone the running interpreter and all
     its state, and run the cloned interpreter in a separate
     thread, beginning execution in the new thread just after the
     point where the fork() was called in the parent.  We will
     refer to the thread that implements this child "process" as
     the pseudo-process.

     To the Perl program that called fork(), all this is designed
     to be transparent.  The parent returns from the fork() with
     a pseudo-process ID that can be subsequently used in any
     process manipulation functions; the child returns from the
     fork() with a value of 0 to signify that it is the child
     pseudo-process.

     Behavior of other Perl features in forked pseudo-processes

     Most Perl features behave in a natural way within
     pseudo-processes.

     $$ or $PROCESS_ID

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             This special variable is correctly set to the
             pseudo-process ID. It can be used to identify
             pseudo-processes within a particular session.  Note
             that this value is subject to recycling if any
             pseudo-processes are launched after others have been
             wait()-ed on.

     %ENV    Each pseudo-process maintains its own virtual
             environment.  Modifications to %ENV affect the vir-
             tual environment, and are only visible within that
             pseudo-process, and in any processes (or
             pseudo-processes) launched from it.

     chdir() and all other builtins that accept filenames
             Each pseudo-process maintains its own virtual idea
             of the current directory. Modifications to the
             current directory using chdir() are only visible
             within that pseudo-process, and in any processes (or
             pseudo-processes) launched from it.  All file and
             directory accesses from the pseudo-process will
             correctly map the virtual working directory to the
             real working directory appropriately.

     wait() and waitpid()
             wait() and waitpid() can be passed a pseudo-process
             ID returned by fork(). These calls will properly
             wait for the termination of the pseudo-process and
             return its status.

     kill()  kill() can be used to terminate a pseudo-process by
             passing it the ID returned by fork().  This should
             not be used except under dire circumstances, because
             the operating system may not guarantee integrity of
             the process resources when a running thread is ter-
             minated.  Note that using kill() on a
             pseudo-process() may typically cause memory leaks,
             because the thread that implements the pseudo-
             process does not get a chance to clean up its
             resources.

     exec()  Calling exec() within a pseudo-process actually
             spawns the requested executable in a separate pro-
             cess and waits for it to complete before exiting
             with the same exit status as that process.  This
             means that the process ID reported within the run-
             ning executable will be different from what the ear-
             lier Perl fork() might have returned.  Similarly,
             any process manipulation functions applied to the ID
             returned by fork() will affect the waiting pseudo-
             process that called exec(), not the real process it
             is waiting for after the exec().

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     exit()  exit() always exits just the executing
             pseudo-process, after automatically wait()-ing for
             any outstanding child pseudo-processes.  Note that
             this means that the process as a whole will not exit
             unless all running pseudo-processes have exited.

     Open handles to files, directories and network sockets
             All open handles are dup()-ed in pseudo-processes,
             so that closing any handles in one process does not
             affect the others.  See below for some limitations.

     Resource limits

     In the eyes of the operating system, pseudo-processes
     created via the fork() emulation are simply threads in the
     same process.  This means that any process-level limits
     imposed by the operating system apply to all pseudo-
     processes taken together.  This includes any limits imposed
     by the operating system on the number of open file, direc-
     tory and socket handles, limits on disk space usage, limits
     on memory size, limits on CPU utilization etc.

     Killing the parent process

     If the parent process is killed (either using Perl's kill()
     builtin, or using some external means) all the pseudo-
     processes are killed as well, and the whole process exits.

     Lifetime of the parent process and pseudo-processes

     During the normal course of events, the parent process and
     every pseudo-process started by it will wait for their
     respective pseudo-children to complete before they exit.
     This means that the parent and every pseudo-child created by
     it that is also a pseudo-parent will only exit after their
     pseudo-children have exited.

     A way to mark a pseudo-processes as running detached from
     their parent (so that the parent would not have to wait()
     for them if it doesn't want to) will be provided in future.

     CAVEATS AND LIMITATIONS

     BEGIN blocks
             The fork() emulation will not work entirely
             correctly when called from within a BEGIN block.
             The forked copy will run the contents of the BEGIN
             block, but will not continue parsing the source
             stream after the BEGIN block.  For example, consider
             the following code:

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                 BEGIN {
                     fork and exit;          # fork child and exit the parent
                     print "inner\n";
                 }
                 print "outer\n";

             This will print:

                 inner

             rather than the expected:

                 inner
                 outer

             This limitation arises from fundamental technical
             difficulties in cloning and restarting the stacks
             used by the Perl parser in the middle of a parse.

     Open filehandles
             Any filehandles open at the time of the fork() will
             be dup()-ed.  Thus, the files can be closed indepen-
             dently in the parent and child, but beware that the
             dup()-ed handles will still share the same seek
             pointer.  Changing the seek position in the parent
             will change it in the child and vice-versa. One can
             avoid this by opening files that need distinct seek
             pointers separately in the child.

     Forking pipe open() not yet implemented
             The "open(FOO, "|-")" and "open(BAR, "-|")" con-
             structs are not yet implemented.  This limitation
             can be easily worked around in new code by creating
             a pipe explicitly.  The following example shows how
             to write to a forked child:

                 # simulate open(FOO, "|-")
                 sub pipe_to_fork ($) {
                     my $parent = shift;
                     pipe my $child, $parent or die;
                     my $pid = fork();
                     die "fork() failed: $!" unless defined $pid;
                     if ($pid) {
                         close $child;
                     }
                     else {
                         close $parent;
                         open(STDIN, "<&=" . fileno($child)) or die;
                     }
                     $pid;
                 }

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                 if (pipe_to_fork('FOO')) {
                     # parent
                     print FOO "pipe_to_fork\n";
                     close FOO;
                 }
                 else {
                     # child
                     while (<STDIN>) { print; }
                     exit(0);
                 }

             And this one reads from the child:

                 # simulate open(FOO, "-|")
                 sub pipe_from_fork ($) {
                     my $parent = shift;
                     pipe $parent, my $child or die;
                     my $pid = fork();
                     die "fork() failed: $!" unless defined $pid;
                     if ($pid) {
                         close $child;
                     }
                     else {
                         close $parent;
                         open(STDOUT, ">&=" . fileno($child)) or die;
                     }
                     $pid;
                 }

                 if (pipe_from_fork('BAR')) {
                     # parent
                     while (<BAR>) { print; }
                     close BAR;
                 }
                 else {
                     # child
                     print "pipe_from_fork\n";
                     exit(0);
                 }

             Forking pipe open() constructs will be supported in
             future.

     Global state maintained by XSUBs
             External subroutines (XSUBs) that maintain their own
             global state may not work correctly.  Such XSUBs
             will either need to maintain locks to protect simul-
             taneous access to global data from different
             pseudo-processes, or maintain all their state on the
             Perl symbol table, which is copied naturally when
             fork() is called.  A callback mechanism that pro-
             vides extensions an opportunity to clone their state

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             will be provided in the near future.

     Interpreter embedded in larger application
             The fork() emulation may not behave as expected when
             it is executed in an application which embeds a Perl
             interpreter and calls Perl APIs that can evaluate
             bits of Perl code.  This stems from the fact that
             the emulation only has knowledge about the Perl
             interpreter's own data structures and knows nothing
             about the containing application's state.  For exam-
             ple, any state carried on the application's own call
             stack is out of reach.

     Thread-safety of extensions
             Since the fork() emulation runs code in multiple
             threads, extensions calling into non-thread-safe
             libraries may not work reliably when calling fork().
             As Perl's threading support gradually becomes more
             widely adopted even on platforms with a native
             fork(), such extensions are expected to be fixed for
             thread-safety.

BUGS

     +       Having pseudo-process IDs be negative integers
             breaks down for the integer "-1" because the wait()
             and waitpid() functions treat this number as being
             special.  The tacit assumption in the current imple-
             mentation is that the system never allocates a
             thread ID of 1 for user threads.  A better represen-
             tation for pseudo-process IDs will be implemented in
             future.

     +       In certain cases, the OS-level handles created by
             the pipe(), socket(), and accept() operators are
             apparently not duplicated accurately in
             pseudo-processes.  This only happens in some situa-
             tions, but where it does happen, it may result in
             deadlocks between the read and write ends of pipe
             handles, or inability to send or receive data across
             socket handles.

     +       This document may be incomplete in some respects.

AUTHOR

     Support for concurrent interpreters and the fork() emulation
     was implemented by ActiveState, with funding from Microsoft
     Corporation.

     This document is authored and maintained by Gurusamy Sarathy
     <gsar@activestate.com>.

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SEE ALSO

     "fork" in perlfunc, perlipc

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