perl, forking and broken file handles

[Madison Kelly]

Hi all,

   I need to call one or more external perl script(s) from within my 
main perl script then wait for them all to finish before proceeding. 
I've real the perl 'fork' and 'IPC' docs but I must be missing 
something... Once the program finishes waiting for the children and 
tries to proceed all file handles and open databases are lost. I am 
pretty sure from reading that this is because the filehandles and DB 
connections are shared with the child(ren) and die with them. What I 
don't know is how to keep these connections alive in the parent script.

   Here is what I am doing that currently breaks:

-=-=-[ code snippet ]-=-=-
{
...
   ## At this point file handles and database connections still work...

   ## This is inside another loop so this might be called multiple times
   ## at once if the user has asked to run multiple backup streams at
   ## once or run each stream in series otherwise.

   ## These are files that have lists of files I want to copy. I will
   ## start one 'rsync' stream for each file after closing the FH
   while ( my $keys = ( each %file_handle ) )
   {
     print LOG "Closing the file handle: [$keys]\n";
     close ($file_handle{$keys});
		
     print LOG "Copying the files listed in: [<path/to/copy.file>] to: 
[</dst/mount/dir/src_name>]\n";

     $SIG{CHLD}="IGNORE";
     my $cpid=fork();
     if ($cpid == 0)
     {
       print "I will now call 'rsync' stream. Copying selected data from 
source: [#<src_id>] to destination: [#<dst_id>]\n";

       open (RSYNC, "/path/to/rsync --<switches> 
--files-from="/path/to/copy.file" </src/mount/dir> 
</dst/mount/dir/src_name> 2>&1 |");
       close (RSYNC);
       exit 0;
   }

   # I was running into a race condition...
   sleep 1;
		
   if ( $parallel_streams == 0 )
   {
     print "You have asked to run each stream one at a time. I will now 
wait for this stream to end.\n";
     wait;
     print "This stream is finished. Thank you for waiting.\n";
   }

}
if ( $parallel_streams == 1 )
{
   # I was running into a race condition...
   sleep 1;
   print "I am waiting for the last stream to finish before proceeding:\n";
   wait;
   print "The last stream is finished. Thank you for waiting.\n";
}

## At this point file handles and database connections are dead...
-=-=-[ End code snippet ]-=-=-

   Any help or insight would be very much appreciated! Alternative ways 
of doing this are also very much welcome, too!

Madison

-- 
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Madison Kelly (Digimer)
TLE-BU, The Linux Experience; Back Up
http://tle-bu.thelinuxexperience.com
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