Re: forking an external process

[Chas Owens <cowens intercall com>]

On Tue, 2002-05-07 at 16:04, Kim Schulz wrote:
> hi
>
> I want my gui to be accesable even when an external process is doing
> some work.
> My program does the following:
> initialise the GUI
> exec of a wget process
> wait for it to return 
> do somthing to the return which will update the GUI (add rows to a
> clist)
>
> as it is now it hangs while the wget process is running. I have tried to
> fork it but it doesnt work:
<snip />

That depends on your definition of works.  When you fork a process it
splits into two independent process.  The split occurs at the fork and
the only difference between the two processes is that one gets a return
of 0 from fork and the other gets the PID of the other process.  So what
happend in your code was one process exec'ed wget and the other ran
parse_xml().  What you need to look into is inter-process communication
(perldoc perlipc).  Luckily Gtk provides a mechanism for monitoring
files (and consequently sockets since they are just specialized files): 
Gtk::Gdk->input_add.
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