NAME

Perl::AfterFork - reinitializes Perl's notion of $$ and getppid()

SYNOPSIS

      use Perl::AfterFork;
      &Perl::AfterFork::reinit_pid;
      &Perl::AfterFork::reinit_ppid;
      &Perl::AfterFork::reinit_pidstatus;
      &Perl::AfterFork::reinit;

DESCRIPTION

Using Perl's "fork()" command or your libc's "fork()" function or even your operating system's "fork" syscall does not do the same thing.

Since a process' PID does not change during it's life time Perl caches the result of the "getpid" syscall using the once fetched PID each time $$ is used. Hence after a successful "fork()" the internal PID-cache must be invalidated. The same argument is valid for "glibc". It caches the getpid(2) as well.

As for getppid(2), Perl is even caching that. In my opinion Perl is doing wrong when caching the getppid(2) result at all since it can change without further notice when the parent process dies.

Further Perl maintains an internal cache of spawned children for it's "waitpid" implementation.

All these cached information can be reinitialized with this module.

reinit_pid

reinitializes the PID-cache

reinit_ppid

reinitializes the PPID-cache

reinit_pidstatus

reinitializes the waitpid-cache

reinit

reinitializes all 3 at once

EXPORT

Not an Exporter.

AUTHOR

Torsten Foertsch, <torsten.foertsch@gmx.net>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2005 by Torsten Foertsch

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.5 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

INSTALLATION

     perl Makefile.PL
     make
     make test
     make install

DEPENDENCIES

• "syscall( SYS_fork )" and "syscall( SYS_getpid )" are needed for testing.
• perl 5.8.0

TESTED ON

• Linux 2.6 with glibc 2.3.3