perlipc - Perl interprocess communication (signals, fifos, pipes, safe subprocesses, sockets,
and semaphores)
The basic IPC facilities of Perl are built out of the good old Unix signals, named pipes,
pipe opens, the Berkeley socket routines, and SysV IPC calls. Each is used in slightly different
situations.
Most of these routines quietly but politely return undef when they fail instead
of causing your program to die right then and there due to an uncaught exception. (Actually,
some of the new Socket conversion functions croak() on bad arguments.) It is therefore
essential to check return values from these functions. Always begin your socket programs this
way for optimal success, and don't forget to add -T taint checking flag to the #! line
for servers:
#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use strict;
use sigtrap;
use Socket;
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All these routines create system-specific portability problems. As noted elsewhere, Perl is
at the mercy of your C libraries for much of its system behaviour. It's probably safest to
assume broken SysV semantics for signals and to stick with simple TCP and UDP socket operations;
e.g., don't try to pass open file descriptors over a local UDP datagram socket if you want your
code to stand a chance of being portable.
As mentioned in the signals section, because few vendors provide C libraries that are safely
re-entrant, the prudent programmer will do little else within a handler beyond setting a numeric
variable that already exists; or, if locked into a slow (restarting) system call, using die() to
raise an exception and longjmp(3) out. In fact, even these may in some cases cause a core dump.
It's probably best to avoid signals except where they are absolutely inevitable. This will be
addressed in a future release of Perl.
Tom Christiansen, with occasional vestiges of Larry Wall's original version and suggestions
from the Perl Porters.
There's a lot more to networking than this, but this should get you started.
For intrepid programmers, the indispensable textbook is Unix Network Programming by W.
Richard Stevens (published by Addison-Wesley). Note that most books on networking address
networking from the perspective of a C programmer; translation to Perl is left as an exercise
for the reader.
The IO::Socket(3) manpage describes the object library, and the Socket(3) manpage describes
the low-level interface to sockets. Besides the obvious functions in perlfunc, you should also check
out the modules file at your nearest CPAN site. (See perlmodlib or best yet, the Perl
FAQ for a description of what CPAN is and where to get it.)
Section 5 of the modules file is devoted to "Networking, Device Control (modems),
and Interprocess Communication", and contains numerous unbundled modules numerous
networking modules, Chat and Expect operations, CGI programming, DCE, FTP, IPC, NNTP, Proxy,
Ptty, RPC, SNMP, SMTP, Telnet, Threads, and ToolTalk--just to name a few.
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