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 capabilities 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.

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:

    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 independently 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.

On some operating systems, notably Solaris and Unixware, calling "exit()" from a child process will flush and close open filehandles in the parent, thereby corrupting the filehandles. On these systems, calling "_exit()" is suggested instead. "_exit()" is available in Perl through the "POSIX" module. Please consult your system's manpages for more information on this.

Open directory handles

Perl will completely read from all open directory handles until they reach the end of the stream. It will then seekdir() back to the original location and all future readdir() requests will be fulfilled from the cache buffer. That means that neither the directory handle held by the parent process nor the one held by the child process will see any changes made to the directory after the fork() call.

Note that rewinddir() has a similar limitation on Windows and will not force readdir() to read the directory again either. Only a newly opened directory handle will reflect changes to the directory.

Forking pipe open() not yet implemented

The "open(FOO, "|-")" and "open(BAR, "-|")" constructs 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;
    }
    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 simultaneous 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 provides extensions an opportunity to clone their state 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 example, 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.

PORTABILITY CAVEATS

In portable Perl code, "kill(9, $child)" must not be used on forked processes. Killing a forked process is unsafe and has unpredictable results. See "kill()", above.

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 implementation is that the system never allocates a thread ID of 1 for user threads. A better representation 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 situations, 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>.

SEE ALSO

"fork" in perlfunc, perlipc