NAME

perlipc - Perl interprocess communication (signals, fifos, pipes, safe subprocesses, sockets, and semaphores)

DESCRIPTION

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.

Signals

Perl uses a simple signal handling model: the %SIG hash contains names or references of user-installed signal handlers. These handlers will be called with an argument which is the name of the signal that triggered it. A signal may be generated intentionally from a particular keyboard sequence like control-C or control-Z, sent to you from another process, or triggered automatically by the kernel when special events transpire, like a child process exiting, your process running out of stack space, or hitting file size limit.

For example, to trap an interrupt signal, set up a handler like this:

    sub catch_zap {
	my $signame = shift;
	$shucks++;
	die "Somebody sent me a SIG$signame";
    }
    $SIG{INT} = 'catch_zap';  # could fail in modules
    $SIG{INT} = \&catch_zap;  # best strategy

Prior to Perl 5.7.3 it was necessary to do as little as you possibly could in your handler; notice how all we do is set a global variable and then raise an exception. That's because on most systems, libraries are not re-entrant; particularly, memory allocation and I/O routines are not. That meant that doing nearly anything in your handler could in theory trigger a memory fault and subsequent core dump - see "Deferred Signals (Safe Signals)" below.

The names of the signals are the ones listed out by kill -l on your system, or you can retrieve them from the Config module. Set up an @signame list indexed by number to get the name and a %signo table indexed by name to get the number:

    use Config;
    defined $Config{sig_name} || die "No sigs?";
    foreach $name (split(' ', $Config{sig_name})) {
	$signo{$name} = $i;
	$signame[$i] = $name;
	$i++;
    }

So to check whether signal 17 and SIGALRM were the same, do just this:

    print "signal #17 = $signame[17]\n";
    if ($signo{ALRM}) {
	print "SIGALRM is $signo{ALRM}\n";
    }

You may also choose to assign the strings 'IGNORE' or 'DEFAULT' as the handler, in which case Perl will try to discard the signal or do the default thing.

On most Unix platforms, the CHLD (sometimes also known as CLD) signal has special behavior with respect to a value of 'IGNORE'. Setting $SIG{CHLD} to 'IGNORE' on such a platform has the effect of not creating zombie processes when the parent process fails to wait() on its child processes (i.e. child processes are automatically reaped). Calling wait() with $SIG{CHLD} set to 'IGNORE' usually returns -1 on such platforms.

Some signals can be neither trapped nor ignored, such as the KILL and STOP (but not the TSTP) signals. One strategy for temporarily ignoring signals is to use a local() statement, which will be automatically restored once your block is exited. (Remember that local() values are "inherited" by functions called from within that block.)

    sub precious {
	local $SIG{INT} = 'IGNORE';
	&more_functions;
    }
    sub more_functions {
	# interrupts still ignored, for now...
    }

Sending a signal to a negative process ID means that you send the signal to the entire Unix process-group. This code sends a hang-up signal to all processes in the current process group (and sets $SIG{HUP} to IGNORE so it doesn't kill itself):

    {
	local $SIG{HUP} = 'IGNORE';
	kill HUP => -$$;
	# snazzy writing of: kill('HUP', -$$)
    }

Another interesting signal to send is signal number zero. This doesn't actually affect a child process, but instead checks whether it's alive or has changed its UID.

    unless (kill 0 => $kid_pid) {
	warn "something wicked happened to $kid_pid";
    }

When directed at a process whose UID is not identical to that of the sending process, signal number zero may fail because you lack permission to send the signal, even though the process is alive. You may be able to determine the cause of failure using %!.

    unless (kill 0 => $pid or $!{EPERM}) {
	warn "$pid looks dead";
    }

You might also want to employ anonymous functions for simple signal handlers:

$SIG{INT} = sub { die "\nOutta here!\n" };

But that will be problematic for the more complicated handlers that need to reinstall themselves. Because Perl's signal mechanism is currently based on the signal(3) function from the C library, you may sometimes be so unfortunate as to run on systems where that function is "broken", that is, it behaves in the old unreliable SysV way rather than the newer, more reasonable BSD and POSIX fashion. So you'll see defensive people writing signal handlers like this:

    sub REAPER {
	$waitedpid = wait;
	# loathe SysV: it makes us not only reinstate
	# the handler, but place it after the wait
	$SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;
    }
    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;
    # now do something that forks...

or better still:

    use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
    sub REAPER {
	my $child;
	# If a second child dies while in the signal handler caused by the
	# first death, we won't get another signal. So must loop here else
	# we will leave the unreaped child as a zombie. And the next time
	# two children die we get another zombie. And so on.
        while (($child = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)) > 0) {
	    $Kid_Status{$child} = $?;
	}
	$SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;  # still loathe SysV
    }
    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;
    # do something that forks...

Signal handling is also used for timeouts in Unix, While safely protected within an eval{} block, you set a signal handler to trap alarm signals and then schedule to have one delivered to you in some number of seconds. Then try your blocking operation, clearing the alarm when it's done but not before you've exited your eval{} block. If it goes off, you'll use die() to jump out of the block, much as you might using longjmp() or throw() in other languages.

Here's an example:

eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm clock restart" };
    alarm 10;
    flock(FH, 2);   # blocking write lock
    alarm 0;
};
if ($@ and $@ !~ /alarm clock restart/) { die }

If the operation being timed out is system() or qx(), this technique is liable to generate zombies. If this matters to you, you'll need to do your own fork() and exec(), and kill the errant child process.

For more complex signal handling, you might see the standard POSIX module. Lamentably, this is almost entirely undocumented, but the t/lib/posix.t file from the Perl source distribution has some examples in it.

Handling the SIGHUP Signal in Daemons

A process that usually starts when the system boots and shuts down when the system is shut down is called a daemon (Disk And Execution MONitor). If a daemon process has a configuration file which is modified after the process has been started, there should be a way to tell that process to re-read its configuration file, without stopping the process. Many daemons provide this mechanism using the SIGHUP signal handler. When you want to tell the daemon to re-read the file you simply send it the SIGHUP signal.

Not all platforms automatically reinstall their (native) signal handlers after a signal delivery. This means that the handler works only the first time the signal is sent. The solution to this problem is to use POSIX signal handlers if available, their behaviour is well-defined.

The following example implements a simple daemon, which restarts itself every time the SIGHUP signal is received. The actual code is located in the subroutine code(), which simply prints some debug info to show that it works and should be replaced with the real code.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use POSIX ();
use FindBin ();
use File::Basename ();
use File::Spec::Functions;

$|=1;

# make the daemon cross-platform, so exec always calls the script
# itself with the right path, no matter how the script was invoked.
my $script = File::Basename::basename($0);
my $SELF = catfile $FindBin::Bin, $script;

# POSIX unmasks the sigprocmask properly
my $sigset = POSIX::SigSet->new();
my $action = POSIX::SigAction->new('sigHUP_handler',
                                   $sigset,
                                   &POSIX::SA_NODEFER);
POSIX::sigaction(&POSIX::SIGHUP, $action);

sub sigHUP_handler {
    print "got SIGHUP\n";
    exec($SELF, @ARGV) or die "Couldn't restart: $!\n";
}

code();

sub code {
    print "PID: $$\n";
    print "ARGV: @ARGV\n";
    my $c = 0;
    while (++$c) {
        sleep 2;
        print "$c\n";
    }
}
__END__

Named Pipes

A named pipe (often referred to as a FIFO) is an old Unix IPC mechanism for processes communicating on the same machine. It works just like a regular, connected anonymous pipes, except that the processes rendezvous using a filename and don't have to be related.

To create a named pipe, use the POSIX::mkfifo() function.

use POSIX qw(mkfifo);
mkfifo($path, 0700) or die "mkfifo $path failed: $!";

You can also use the Unix command mknod(1) or on some systems, mkfifo(1). These may not be in your normal path.

    # system return val is backwards, so && not ||
    #
    $ENV{PATH} .= ":/etc:/usr/etc";
    if  (      system('mknod',  $path, 'p')
	    && system('mkfifo', $path) )
    {
	die "mk{nod,fifo} $path failed";
    }

A fifo is convenient when you want to connect a process to an unrelated one. When you open a fifo, the program will block until there's something on the other end.

For example, let's say you'd like to have your .signature file be a named pipe that has a Perl program on the other end. Now every time any program (like a mailer, news reader, finger program, etc.) tries to read from that file, the reading program will block and your program will supply the new signature. We'll use the pipe-checking file test -p to find out whether anyone (or anything) has accidentally removed our fifo.

    chdir; # go home
    $FIFO = '.signature';

    while (1) {
	unless (-p $FIFO) {
	    unlink $FIFO;
	    require POSIX;
	    POSIX::mkfifo($FIFO, 0700)
		or die "can't mkfifo $FIFO: $!";
	}

	# next line blocks until there's a reader
	open (FIFO, "> $FIFO") || die "can't write $FIFO: $!";
	print FIFO "John Smith (smith\@host.org)\n", `fortune -s`;
	close FIFO;
	sleep 2;    # to avoid dup signals
    }

Deferred Signals (Safe Signals)

In Perls before Perl 5.7.3 by installing Perl code to deal with signals, you were exposing yourself to danger from two things. First, few system library functions are re-entrant. If the signal interrupts while Perl is executing one function (like malloc(3) or printf(3)), and your signal handler then calls the same function again, you could get unpredictable behavior--often, a core dump. Second, Perl isn't itself re-entrant at the lowest levels. If the signal interrupts Perl while Perl is changing its own internal data structures, similarly unpredictable behaviour may result.

There were two things you could do, knowing this: be paranoid or be pragmatic. The paranoid approach was to do as little as possible in your signal handler. Set an existing integer variable that already has a value, and return. This doesn't help you if you're in a slow system call, which will just restart. That means you have to die to longjmp(3) out of the handler. Even this is a little cavalier for the true paranoiac, who avoids die in a handler because the system is out to get you. The pragmatic approach was to say "I know the risks, but prefer the convenience", and to do anything you wanted in your signal handler, and be prepared to clean up core dumps now and again.

Perl 5.7.3 and later avoid these problems by "deferring" signals. That is, when the signal is delivered to the process by the system (to the C code that implements Perl) a flag is set, and the handler returns immediately. Then at strategic "safe" points in the Perl interpreter (e.g. when it is about to execute a new opcode) the flags are checked and the Perl level handler from %SIG is executed. The "deferred" scheme allows much more flexibility in the coding of signal handler as we know Perl interpreter is in a safe state, and that we are not in a system library function when the handler is called. However the implementation does differ from previous Perls in the following ways:

Long-running opcodes

As the Perl interpreter only looks at the signal flags when it is about to execute a new opcode, a signal that arrives during a long-running opcode (e.g. a regular expression operation on a very large string) will not be seen until the current opcode completes.

N.B. If a signal of any given type fires multiple times during an opcode (such as from a fine-grained timer), the handler for that signal will only be called once after the opcode completes, and all the other instances will be discarded. Furthermore, if your system's signal queue gets flooded to the point that there are signals that have been raised but not yet caught (and thus not deferred) at the time an opcode completes, those signals may well be caught and deferred during subsequent opcodes, with sometimes surprising results. For example, you may see alarms delivered even after calling alarm(0) as the latter stops the raising of alarms but does not cancel the delivery of alarms raised but not yet caught. Do not depend on the behaviors described in this paragraph as they are side effects of the current implementation and may change in future versions of Perl.

Interrupting IO

When a signal is delivered (e.g. INT control-C) the operating system breaks into IO operations like read (used to implement Perls <> operator). On older Perls the handler was called immediately (and as read is not "unsafe" this worked well). With the "deferred" scheme the handler is not called immediately, and if Perl is using system's stdio library that library may re-start the read without returning to Perl and giving it a chance to call the %SIG handler. If this happens on your system the solution is to use :perlio layer to do IO - at least on those handles which you want to be able to break into with signals. (The :perlio layer checks the signal flags and calls %SIG handlers before resuming IO operation.)

Note that the default in Perl 5.7.3 and later is to automatically use the :perlio layer.

Note that some networking library functions like gethostbyname() are known to have their own implementations of timeouts which may conflict with your timeouts. If you are having problems with such functions, you can try using the POSIX sigaction() function, which bypasses the Perl safe signals (note that this means subjecting yourself to possible memory corruption, as described above). Instead of setting $SIG{ALRM}:

local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm" };

try something like the following:

use POSIX qw(SIGALRM);
POSIX::sigaction(SIGALRM,
                 POSIX::SigAction->new(sub { die "alarm" }))
      or die "Error setting SIGALRM handler: $!\n";

Another way to disable the safe signal behavior locally is to use the Perl::Unsafe::Signals module from CPAN (which will affect all signals).

Restartable system calls

On systems that supported it, older versions of Perl used the SA_RESTART flag when installing %SIG handlers. This meant that restartable system calls would continue rather than returning when a signal arrived. In order to deliver deferred signals promptly, Perl 5.7.3 and later do not use SA_RESTART. Consequently, restartable system calls can fail (with $! set to EINTR) in places where they previously would have succeeded.

Note that the default :perlio layer will retry read, write and close as described above and that interrupted wait and waitpid calls will always be retried.

Signals as "faults"

Certain signals, e.g. SEGV, ILL, and BUS, are generated as a result of virtual memory or other "faults". These are normally fatal and there is little a Perl-level handler can do with them, so Perl now delivers them immediately rather than attempting to defer them.

Signals triggered by operating system state

On some operating systems certain signal handlers are supposed to "do something" before returning. One example can be CHLD or CLD which indicates a child process has completed. On some operating systems the signal handler is expected to wait for the completed child process. On such systems the deferred signal scheme will not work for those signals (it does not do the wait). Again the failure will look like a loop as the operating system will re-issue the signal as there are un-waited-for completed child processes.

If you want the old signal behaviour back regardless of possible memory corruption, set the environment variable PERL_SIGNALS to "unsafe" (a new feature since Perl 5.8.1).

Using open() for IPC

Perl's basic open() statement can also be used for unidirectional interprocess communication by either appending or prepending a pipe symbol to the second argument to open(). Here's how to start something up in a child process you intend to write to:

    open(SPOOLER, "| cat -v | lpr -h 2>/dev/null")
		    || die "can't fork: $!";
    local $SIG{PIPE} = sub { die "spooler pipe broke" };
    print SPOOLER "stuff\n";
    close SPOOLER || die "bad spool: $! $?";

And here's how to start up a child process you intend to read from:

    open(STATUS, "netstat -an 2>&1 |")
		    || die "can't fork: $!";
    while (<STATUS>) {
	next if /^(tcp|udp)/;
	print;
    }
    close STATUS || die "bad netstat: $! $?";

If one can be sure that a particular program is a Perl script that is expecting filenames in @ARGV, the clever programmer can write something like this:

% program f1 "cmd1|" - f2 "cmd2|" f3 < tmpfile

and irrespective of which shell it's called from, the Perl program will read from the file f1, the process cmd1, standard input (tmpfile in this case), the f2 file, the cmd2 command, and finally the f3 file. Pretty nifty, eh?

You might notice that you could use backticks for much the same effect as opening a pipe for reading:

print grep { !/^(tcp|udp)/ } `netstat -an 2>&1`;
die "bad netstat" if $?;

While this is true on the surface, it's much more efficient to process the file one line or record at a time because then you don't have to read the whole thing into memory at once. It also gives you finer control of the whole process, letting you to kill off the child process early if you'd like.

Be careful to check both the open() and the close() return values. If you're writing to a pipe, you should also trap SIGPIPE. Otherwise, think of what happens when you start up a pipe to a command that doesn't exist: the open() will in all likelihood succeed (it only reflects the fork()'s success), but then your output will fail--spectacularly. Perl can't know whether the command worked because your command is actually running in a separate process whose exec() might have failed. Therefore, while readers of bogus commands return just a quick end of file, writers to bogus command will trigger a signal they'd better be prepared to handle. Consider:

open(FH, "|bogus")	or die "can't fork: $!";
print FH "bang\n"	or die "can't write: $!";
close FH		or die "can't close: $!";

That won't blow up until the close, and it will blow up with a SIGPIPE. To catch it, you could use this:

$SIG{PIPE} = 'IGNORE';
open(FH, "|bogus")  or die "can't fork: $!";
print FH "bang\n"   or die "can't write: $!";
close FH            or die "can't close: status=$?";

Filehandles

Both the main process and any child processes it forks share the same STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR filehandles. If both processes try to access them at once, strange things can happen. You may also want to close or reopen the filehandles for the child. You can get around this by opening your pipe with open(), but on some systems this means that the child process cannot outlive the parent.

Background Processes

You can run a command in the background with:

system("cmd &");

The command's STDOUT and STDERR (and possibly STDIN, depending on your shell) will be the same as the parent's. You won't need to catch SIGCHLD because of the double-fork taking place (see below for more details).

Complete Dissociation of Child from Parent

In some cases (starting server processes, for instance) you'll want to completely dissociate the child process from the parent. This is often called daemonization. A well behaved daemon will also chdir() to the root directory (so it doesn't prevent unmounting the filesystem containing the directory from which it was launched) and redirect its standard file descriptors from and to /dev/null (so that random output doesn't wind up on the user's terminal).

    use POSIX 'setsid';

    sub daemonize {
	chdir '/'		or die "Can't chdir to /: $!";
	open STDIN, '/dev/null' or die "Can't read /dev/null: $!";
	open STDOUT, '>/dev/null'
				or die "Can't write to /dev/null: $!";
	defined(my $pid = fork)	or die "Can't fork: $!";
	exit if $pid;
	die "Can't start a new session: $!" if setsid == -1;
	open STDERR, '>&STDOUT'	or die "Can't dup stdout: $!";
    }

The fork() has to come before the setsid() to ensure that you aren't a process group leader (the setsid() will fail if you are). If your system doesn't have the setsid() function, open /dev/tty and use the TIOCNOTTY ioctl() on it instead. See tty(4) for details.

Non-Unix users should check their Your_OS::Process module for other solutions.

Safe Pipe Opens

Another interesting approach to IPC is making your single program go multiprocess and communicate between (or even amongst) yourselves. The open() function will accept a file argument of either "-|" or "|-" to do a very interesting thing: it forks a child connected to the filehandle you've opened. The child is running the same program as the parent. This is useful for safely opening a file when running under an assumed UID or GID, for example. If you open a pipe to minus, you can write to the filehandle you opened and your kid will find it in his STDIN. If you open a pipe from minus, you can read from the filehandle you opened whatever your kid writes to his STDOUT.

    use English '-no_match_vars';
    my $sleep_count = 0;

    do {
	$pid = open(KID_TO_WRITE, "|-");
	unless (defined $pid) {
	    warn "cannot fork: $!";
	    die "bailing out" if $sleep_count++ > 6;
	    sleep 10;
	}
    } until defined $pid;

    if ($pid) {  # parent
	print KID_TO_WRITE @some_data;
	close(KID_TO_WRITE) || warn "kid exited $?";
    } else {     # child
	($EUID, $EGID) = ($UID, $GID); # suid progs only
	open (FILE, "> /safe/file")
	    || die "can't open /safe/file: $!";
	while (<STDIN>) {
	    print FILE; # child's STDIN is parent's KID_TO_WRITE
	}
	exit;  # don't forget this
    }

Another common use for this construct is when you need to execute something without the shell's interference. With system(), it's straightforward, but you can't use a pipe open or backticks safely. That's because there's no way to stop the shell from getting its hands on your arguments. Instead, use lower-level control to call exec() directly.

Here's a safe backtick or pipe open for read:

    # add error processing as above
    $pid = open(KID_TO_READ, "-|");

    if ($pid) {   # parent
	while (<KID_TO_READ>) {
	    # do something interesting
	}
	close(KID_TO_READ) || warn "kid exited $?";

    } else {      # child
	($EUID, $EGID) = ($UID, $GID); # suid only
	exec($program, @options, @args)
	    || die "can't exec program: $!";
	# NOTREACHED
    }

And here's a safe pipe open for writing:

    # add error processing as above
    $pid = open(KID_TO_WRITE, "|-");
    $SIG{PIPE} = sub { die "whoops, $program pipe broke" };

    if ($pid) {  # parent
	for (@data) {
	    print KID_TO_WRITE;
	}
	close(KID_TO_WRITE) || warn "kid exited $?";

    } else {     # child
	($EUID, $EGID) = ($UID, $GID);
	exec($program, @options, @args)
	    || die "can't exec program: $!";
	# NOTREACHED
    }

It is very easy to dead-lock a process using this form of open(), or indeed any use of pipe() and multiple sub-processes. The above example is 'safe' because it is simple and calls exec(). See "Avoiding Pipe Deadlocks" for general safety principles, but there are extra gotchas with Safe Pipe Opens.

In particular, if you opened the pipe using open FH, "|-", then you cannot simply use close() in the parent process to close an unwanted writer. Consider this code:

    $pid = open WRITER, "|-";
    defined $pid or die "fork failed; $!";
    if ($pid) {
        if (my $sub_pid = fork()) {
            close WRITER;
            # do something else...
        }
        else {
            # write to WRITER...
	    exit;
        }
    }
    else {
        # do something with STDIN...
	exit;
    }

In the above, the true parent does not want to write to the WRITER filehandle, so it closes it. However, because WRITER was opened using open FH, "|-", it has a special behaviour: closing it will call waitpid() (see "waitpid" in perlfunc), which waits for the sub-process to exit. If the child process ends up waiting for something happening in the section marked "do something else", then you have a deadlock.

This can also be a problem with intermediate sub-processes in more complicated code, which will call waitpid() on all open filehandles during global destruction; in no predictable order.

To solve this, you must manually use pipe(), fork(), and the form of open() which sets one file descriptor to another, as below:

    pipe(READER, WRITER);
    $pid = fork();
    defined $pid or die "fork failed; $!";
    if ($pid) {
	close READER;
        if (my $sub_pid = fork()) {
            close WRITER;
        }
        else {
            # write to WRITER...
	    exit;
        }
        # write to WRITER...
    }
    else {
        open STDIN, "<&READER";
        close WRITER;
        # do something...
        exit;
    }

Since Perl 5.8.0, you can also use the list form of open for pipes : the syntax

open KID_PS, "-|", "ps", "aux" or die $!;

forks the ps(1) command (without spawning a shell, as there are more than three arguments to open()), and reads its standard output via the KID_PS filehandle. The corresponding syntax to write to command pipes (with "|-" in place of "-|") is also implemented.

Note that these operations are full Unix forks, which means they may not be correctly implemented on alien systems. Additionally, these are not true multithreading. If you'd like to learn more about threading, see the modules file mentioned below in the SEE ALSO section.

Avoiding Pipe Deadlocks

In general, if you have more than one sub-process, you need to be very careful that any process which does not need the writer half of any pipe you create for inter-process communication does not have it open.

The reason for this is that any child process which is reading from the pipe and expecting an EOF will never receive it, and therefore never exit. A single process closing a pipe is not enough to close it; the last process with the pipe open must close it for it to read EOF.

Certain built-in Unix features help prevent this most of the time. For instance, filehandles have a 'close on exec' flag (set en masse with Perl using the $^F perlvar), so that any filehandles which you didn't explicitly route to the STDIN, STDOUT or STDERR of a child program will automatically be closed for you.

So, always explicitly and immediately call close() on the writable end of any pipe, unless that process is actually writing to it. If you don't explicitly call close() then be warned Perl will still close() all the filehandles during global destruction. As warned above, if those filehandles were opened with Safe Pipe Open, they will also call waitpid() and you might again deadlock.

Bidirectional Communication with Another Process

While this works reasonably well for unidirectional communication, what about bidirectional communication? The obvious thing you'd like to do doesn't actually work:

open(PROG_FOR_READING_AND_WRITING, "| some program |")

and if you forget to use the use warnings pragma or the -w flag, then you'll miss out entirely on the diagnostic message:

Can't do bidirectional pipe at -e line 1.

If you really want to, you can use the standard open2() library function to catch both ends. There's also an open3() for tridirectional I/O so you can also catch your child's STDERR, but doing so would then require an awkward select() loop and wouldn't allow you to use normal Perl input operations.

If you look at its source, you'll see that open2() uses low-level primitives like Unix pipe() and exec() calls to create all the connections. While it might have been slightly more efficient by using socketpair(), it would have then been even less portable than it already is. The open2() and open3() functions are unlikely to work anywhere except on a Unix system or some other one purporting to be POSIX compliant.

Here's an example of using open2():

use FileHandle;
use IPC::Open2;
$pid = open2(*Reader, *Writer, "cat -u -n" );
print Writer "stuff\n";
$got = <Reader>;

The problem with this is that Unix buffering is really going to ruin your day. Even though your Writer filehandle is auto-flushed, and the process on the other end will get your data in a timely manner, you can't usually do anything to force it to give it back to you in a similarly quick fashion. In this case, we could, because we gave cat a -u flag to make it unbuffered. But very few Unix commands are designed to operate over pipes, so this seldom works unless you yourself wrote the program on the other end of the double-ended pipe.

A solution to this is the nonstandard Comm.pl library. It uses pseudo-ttys to make your program behave more reasonably:

    require 'Comm.pl';
    $ph = open_proc('cat -n');
    for (1..10) {
	print $ph "a line\n";
	print "got back ", scalar <$ph>;
    }

This way you don't have to have control over the source code of the program you're using. The Comm library also has expect() and interact() functions. Find the library (and we hope its successor IPC::Chat) at your nearest CPAN archive as detailed in the SEE ALSO section below.

The newer Expect.pm module from CPAN also addresses this kind of thing. This module requires two other modules from CPAN: IO::Pty and IO::Stty. It sets up a pseudo-terminal to interact with programs that insist on using talking to the terminal device driver. If your system is amongst those supported, this may be your best bet.

Bidirectional Communication with Yourself

If you want, you may make low-level pipe() and fork() to stitch this together by hand. This example only talks to itself, but you could reopen the appropriate handles to STDIN and STDOUT and call other processes.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    # pipe1 - bidirectional communication using two pipe pairs
    #         designed for the socketpair-challenged
    use IO::Handle;	# thousands of lines just for autoflush :-(
    pipe(PARENT_RDR, CHILD_WTR);		# XXX: failure?
    pipe(CHILD_RDR,  PARENT_WTR);		# XXX: failure?
    CHILD_WTR->autoflush(1);
    PARENT_WTR->autoflush(1);

    if ($pid = fork) {
	close PARENT_RDR; close PARENT_WTR;
	print CHILD_WTR "Parent Pid $$ is sending this\n";
	chomp($line = <CHILD_RDR>);
	print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: `$line'\n";
	close CHILD_RDR; close CHILD_WTR;
	waitpid($pid,0);
    } else {
	die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
	close CHILD_RDR; close CHILD_WTR;
	chomp($line = <PARENT_RDR>);
	print "Child Pid $$ just read this: `$line'\n";
	print PARENT_WTR "Child Pid $$ is sending this\n";
	close PARENT_RDR; close PARENT_WTR;
	exit;
    }

But you don't actually have to make two pipe calls. If you have the socketpair() system call, it will do this all for you.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    # pipe2 - bidirectional communication using socketpair
    #   "the best ones always go both ways"

    use Socket;
    use IO::Handle;	# thousands of lines just for autoflush :-(
    # We say AF_UNIX because although *_LOCAL is the
    # POSIX 1003.1g form of the constant, many machines
    # still don't have it.
    socketpair(CHILD, PARENT, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC)
				or  die "socketpair: $!";

    CHILD->autoflush(1);
    PARENT->autoflush(1);

    if ($pid = fork) {
	close PARENT;
	print CHILD "Parent Pid $$ is sending this\n";
	chomp($line = <CHILD>);
	print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: `$line'\n";
	close CHILD;
	waitpid($pid,0);
    } else {
	die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
	close CHILD;
	chomp($line = <PARENT>);
	print "Child Pid $$ just read this: `$line'\n";
	print PARENT "Child Pid $$ is sending this\n";
	close PARENT;
	exit;
    }

Sockets: Client/Server Communication

While not limited to Unix-derived operating systems (e.g., WinSock on PCs provides socket support, as do some VMS libraries), you may not have sockets on your system, in which case this section probably isn't going to do you much good. With sockets, you can do both virtual circuits (i.e., TCP streams) and datagrams (i.e., UDP packets). You may be able to do even more depending on your system.

The Perl function calls for dealing with sockets have the same names as the corresponding system calls in C, but their arguments tend to differ for two reasons: first, Perl filehandles work differently than C file descriptors. Second, Perl already knows the length of its strings, so you don't need to pass that information.

One of the major problems with old socket code in Perl was that it used hard-coded values for some of the constants, which severely hurt portability. If you ever see code that does anything like explicitly setting $AF_INET = 2, you know you're in for big trouble: An immeasurably superior approach is to use the Socket module, which more reliably grants access to various constants and functions you'll need.

If you're not writing a server/client for an existing protocol like NNTP or SMTP, you should give some thought to how your server will know when the client has finished talking, and vice-versa. Most protocols are based on one-line messages and responses (so one party knows the other has finished when a "\n" is received) or multi-line messages and responses that end with a period on an empty line ("\n.\n" terminates a message/response).

Internet Line Terminators

The Internet line terminator is "\015\012". Under ASCII variants of Unix, that could usually be written as "\r\n", but under other systems, "\r\n" might at times be "\015\015\012", "\012\012\015", or something completely different. The standards specify writing "\015\012" to be conformant (be strict in what you provide), but they also recommend accepting a lone "\012" on input (but be lenient in what you require). We haven't always been very good about that in the code in this manpage, but unless you're on a Mac, you'll probably be ok.

Internet TCP Clients and Servers

Use Internet-domain sockets when you want to do client-server communication that might extend to machines outside of your own system.

Here's a sample TCP client using Internet-domain sockets:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use strict;
    use Socket;
    my ($remote,$port, $iaddr, $paddr, $proto, $line);

    $remote  = shift || 'localhost';
    $port    = shift || 2345;  # random port
    if ($port =~ /\D/) { $port = getservbyname($port, 'tcp') }
    die "No port" unless $port;
    $iaddr   = inet_aton($remote) 		|| die "no host: $remote";
    $paddr   = sockaddr_in($port, $iaddr);

    $proto   = getprotobyname('tcp');
    socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)	|| die "socket: $!";
    connect(SOCK, $paddr)    || die "connect: $!";
    while (defined($line = <SOCK>)) {
	print $line;
    }

    close (SOCK)	    || die "close: $!";
    exit;

And here's a corresponding server to go along with it. We'll leave the address as INADDR_ANY so that the kernel can choose the appropriate interface on multihomed hosts. If you want sit on a particular interface (like the external side of a gateway or firewall machine), you should fill this in with your real address instead.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
    use strict;
    BEGIN { $ENV{PATH} = '/usr/ucb:/bin' }
    use Socket;
    use Carp;
    my $EOL = "\015\012";

    sub logmsg { print "$0 $$: @_ at ", scalar localtime, "\n" }

    my $port = shift || 2345;
    my $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');

    ($port) = $port =~ /^(\d+)$/                        or die "invalid port";

    socket(Server, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)	|| die "socket: $!";
    setsockopt(Server, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR,
					pack("l", 1)) 	|| die "setsockopt: $!";
    bind(Server, sockaddr_in($port, INADDR_ANY))	|| die "bind: $!";
    listen(Server,SOMAXCONN) 				|| die "listen: $!";

    logmsg "server started on port $port";

    my $paddr;

    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;

    for ( ; $paddr = accept(Client,Server); close Client) {
	my($port,$iaddr) = sockaddr_in($paddr);
	my $name = gethostbyaddr($iaddr,AF_INET);

	logmsg "connection from $name [",
		inet_ntoa($iaddr), "]
		at port $port";

	print Client "Hello there, $name, it's now ",
			scalar localtime, $EOL;
    }

And here's a multithreaded version. It's multithreaded in that like most typical servers, it spawns (forks) a slave server to handle the client request so that the master server can quickly go back to service a new client.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
    use strict;
    BEGIN { $ENV{PATH} = '/usr/ucb:/bin' }
    use Socket;
    use Carp;
    my $EOL = "\015\012";

    sub spawn;  # forward declaration
    sub logmsg { print "$0 $$: @_ at ", scalar localtime, "\n" }

    my $port = shift || 2345;
    my $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');

    ($port) = $port =~ /^(\d+)$/                        or die "invalid port";

    socket(Server, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)	|| die "socket: $!";
    setsockopt(Server, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR,
					pack("l", 1)) 	|| die "setsockopt: $!";
    bind(Server, sockaddr_in($port, INADDR_ANY))	|| die "bind: $!";
    listen(Server,SOMAXCONN) 				|| die "listen: $!";

    logmsg "server started on port $port";

    my $waitedpid = 0;
    my $paddr;

    use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
    use Errno;

    sub REAPER {
        local $!;   # don't let waitpid() overwrite current error
        while ((my $pid = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)) > 0 && WIFEXITED($?)) {
            logmsg "reaped $waitedpid" . ($? ? " with exit $?" : '');
        }
        $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;  # loathe SysV
    }

    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;

    while(1) {
        $paddr = accept(Client, Server) || do {
            # try again if accept() returned because a signal was received
            next if $!{EINTR};
            die "accept: $!";
        };
        my ($port, $iaddr) = sockaddr_in($paddr);
        my $name = gethostbyaddr($iaddr, AF_INET);

        logmsg "connection from $name [",
               inet_ntoa($iaddr),
               "] at port $port";

        spawn sub {
            $|=1;
            print "Hello there, $name, it's now ", scalar localtime, $EOL;
            exec '/usr/games/fortune'       # XXX: `wrong' line terminators
                or confess "can't exec fortune: $!";
        };
        close Client;
    }

    sub spawn {
        my $coderef = shift;

        unless (@_ == 0 && $coderef && ref($coderef) eq 'CODE') {
            confess "usage: spawn CODEREF";
        }

        my $pid;
        if (! defined($pid = fork)) {
            logmsg "cannot fork: $!";
            return;
        } 
        elsif ($pid) {
            logmsg "begat $pid";
            return; # I'm the parent
        }
        # else I'm the child -- go spawn

        open(STDIN,  "<&Client")   || die "can't dup client to stdin";
        open(STDOUT, ">&Client")   || die "can't dup client to stdout";
        ## open(STDERR, ">&STDOUT") || die "can't dup stdout to stderr";
        exit &$coderef();
    }

This server takes the trouble to clone off a child version via fork() for each incoming request. That way it can handle many requests at once, which you might not always want. Even if you don't fork(), the listen() will allow that many pending connections. Forking servers have to be particularly careful about cleaning up their dead children (called "zombies" in Unix parlance), because otherwise you'll quickly fill up your process table. The REAPER subroutine is used here to call waitpid() for any child processes that have finished, thereby ensuring that they terminate cleanly and don't join the ranks of the living dead.

Within the while loop we call accept() and check to see if it returns a false value. This would normally indicate a system error that needs to be reported. However the introduction of safe signals (see "Deferred Signals (Safe Signals)" above) in Perl 5.7.3 means that accept() may also be interrupted when the process receives a signal. This typically happens when one of the forked sub-processes exits and notifies the parent process with a CHLD signal.

If accept() is interrupted by a signal then $! will be set to EINTR. If this happens then we can safely continue to the next iteration of the loop and another call to accept(). It is important that your signal handling code doesn't modify the value of $! or this test will most likely fail. In the REAPER subroutine we create a local version of $! before calling waitpid(). When waitpid() sets $! to ECHILD (as it inevitably does when it has no more children waiting), it will update the local copy leaving the original unchanged.

We suggest that you use the -T flag to use taint checking (see perlsec) even if we aren't running setuid or setgid. This is always a good idea for servers and other programs run on behalf of someone else (like CGI scripts), because it lessens the chances that people from the outside will be able to compromise your system.

Let's look at another TCP client. This one connects to the TCP "time" service on a number of different machines and shows how far their clocks differ from the system on which it's being run:

    #!/usr/bin/perl  -w
    use strict;
    use Socket;

    my $SECS_of_70_YEARS = 2208988800;
    sub ctime { scalar localtime(shift) }

    my $iaddr = gethostbyname('localhost');
    my $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');
    my $port = getservbyname('time', 'tcp');
    my $paddr = sockaddr_in(0, $iaddr);
    my($host);

    $| = 1;
    printf "%-24s %8s %s\n",  "localhost", 0, ctime(time());

    foreach $host (@ARGV) {
	printf "%-24s ", $host;
	my $hisiaddr = inet_aton($host)     || die "unknown host";
	my $hispaddr = sockaddr_in($port, $hisiaddr);
	socket(SOCKET, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)   || die "socket: $!";
	connect(SOCKET, $hispaddr)          || die "connect: $!";
	my $rtime = '    ';
	read(SOCKET, $rtime, 4);
	close(SOCKET);
	my $histime = unpack("N", $rtime) - $SECS_of_70_YEARS;
	printf "%8d %s\n", $histime - time, ctime($histime);
    }

Unix-Domain TCP Clients and Servers

That's fine for Internet-domain clients and servers, but what about local communications? While you can use the same setup, sometimes you don't want to. Unix-domain sockets are local to the current host, and are often used internally to implement pipes. Unlike Internet domain sockets, Unix domain sockets can show up in the file system with an ls(1) listing.

% ls -l /dev/log
srw-rw-rw-  1 root            0 Oct 31 07:23 /dev/log

You can test for these with Perl's -S file test:

    unless ( -S '/dev/log' ) {
	die "something's wicked with the log system";
    }

Here's a sample Unix-domain client:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use Socket;
    use strict;
    my ($rendezvous, $line);

    $rendezvous = shift || 'catsock';
    socket(SOCK, PF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, 0)	|| die "socket: $!";
    connect(SOCK, sockaddr_un($rendezvous))	|| die "connect: $!";
    while (defined($line = <SOCK>)) {
	print $line;
    }
    exit;

And here's a corresponding server. You don't have to worry about silly network terminators here because Unix domain sockets are guaranteed to be on the localhost, and thus everything works right.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
    use strict;
    use Socket;
    use Carp;

    BEGIN { $ENV{PATH} = '/usr/ucb:/bin' }
    sub spawn;  # forward declaration
    sub logmsg { print "$0 $$: @_ at ", scalar localtime, "\n" }

    my $NAME = 'catsock';
    my $uaddr = sockaddr_un($NAME);
    my $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');

    socket(Server,PF_UNIX,SOCK_STREAM,0) 	|| die "socket: $!";
    unlink($NAME);
    bind  (Server, $uaddr) 			|| die "bind: $!";
    listen(Server,SOMAXCONN)			|| die "listen: $!";

    logmsg "server started on $NAME";

    my $waitedpid;

    use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
    sub REAPER {
	my $child;
        while (($waitedpid = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)) > 0) {
	    logmsg "reaped $waitedpid" . ($? ? " with exit $?" : '');
	}
	$SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;  # loathe SysV
    }

    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;


    for ( $waitedpid = 0;
	  accept(Client,Server) || $waitedpid;
	  $waitedpid = 0, close Client)
    {
	next if $waitedpid;
	logmsg "connection on $NAME";
	spawn sub {
	    print "Hello there, it's now ", scalar localtime, "\n";
	    exec '/usr/games/fortune' or die "can't exec fortune: $!";
	};
    }

    sub spawn {
	my $coderef = shift;

	unless (@_ == 0 && $coderef && ref($coderef) eq 'CODE') {
	    confess "usage: spawn CODEREF";
	}

	my $pid;
	if (!defined($pid = fork)) {
	    logmsg "cannot fork: $!";
	    return;
	} elsif ($pid) {
	    logmsg "begat $pid";
	    return; # I'm the parent
	}
	# else I'm the child -- go spawn

	open(STDIN,  "<&Client")   || die "can't dup client to stdin";
	open(STDOUT, ">&Client")   || die "can't dup client to stdout";
	## open(STDERR, ">&STDOUT") || die "can't dup stdout to stderr";
	exit &$coderef();
    }

As you see, it's remarkably similar to the Internet domain TCP server, so much so, in fact, that we've omitted several duplicate functions--spawn(), logmsg(), ctime(), and REAPER()--which are exactly the same as in the other server.

So why would you ever want to use a Unix domain socket instead of a simpler named pipe? Because a named pipe doesn't give you sessions. You can't tell one process's data from another's. With socket programming, you get a separate session for each client: that's why accept() takes two arguments.

For example, let's say that you have a long running database server daemon that you want folks from the World Wide Web to be able to access, but only if they go through a CGI interface. You'd have a small, simple CGI program that does whatever checks and logging you feel like, and then acts as a Unix-domain client and connects to your private server.

TCP Clients with IO::Socket

For those preferring a higher-level interface to socket programming, the IO::Socket module provides an object-oriented approach. IO::Socket is included as part of the standard Perl distribution as of the 5.004 release. If you're running an earlier version of Perl, just fetch IO::Socket from CPAN, where you'll also find modules providing easy interfaces to the following systems: DNS, FTP, Ident (RFC 931), NIS and NISPlus, NNTP, Ping, POP3, SMTP, SNMP, SSLeay, Telnet, and Time--just to name a few.

A Simple Client

Here's a client that creates a TCP connection to the "daytime" service at port 13 of the host name "localhost" and prints out everything that the server there cares to provide.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use IO::Socket;
    $remote = IO::Socket::INET->new(
			Proto    => "tcp",
			PeerAddr => "localhost",
			PeerPort => "daytime(13)",
		    )
		  or die "cannot connect to daytime port at localhost";
    while ( <$remote> ) { print }

When you run this program, you should get something back that looks like this:

Wed May 14 08:40:46 MDT 1997

Here are what those parameters to the new constructor mean:

Proto: This is which protocol to use. In this case, the socket handle returned will be connected to a TCP socket, because we want a stream-oriented connection, that is, one that acts pretty much like a plain old file. Not all sockets are this of this type. For example, the UDP protocol can be used to make a datagram socket, used for message-passing.
PeerAddr: This is the name or Internet address of the remote host the server is running on. We could have specified a longer name like "www.perl.com", or an address like "204.148.40.9". For demonstration purposes, we've used the special hostname "localhost", which should always mean the current machine you're running on. The corresponding Internet address for localhost is "127.1", if you'd rather use that.
PeerPort: This is the service name or port number we'd like to connect to. We could have gotten away with using just "daytime" on systems with a well-configured system services file,[FOOTNOTE: The system services file is in /etc/services under Unix] but just in case, we've specified the port number (13) in parentheses. Using just the number would also have worked, but constant numbers make careful programmers nervous.

Notice how the return value from the new constructor is used as a filehandle in the while loop? That's what's called an indirect filehandle, a scalar variable containing a filehandle. You can use it the same way you would a normal filehandle. For example, you can read one line from it this way:

$line = <$handle>;

all remaining lines from is this way:

@lines = <$handle>;

and send a line of data to it this way:

print $handle "some data\n";

A Webget Client

Here's a simple client that takes a remote host to fetch a document from, and then a list of documents to get from that host. This is a more interesting client than the previous one because it first sends something to the server before fetching the server's response.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use IO::Socket;
    unless (@ARGV > 1) { die "usage: $0 host document ..." }
    $host = shift(@ARGV);
    $EOL = "\015\012";
    $BLANK = $EOL x 2;
    foreach $document ( @ARGV ) {
	$remote = IO::Socket::INET->new( Proto     => "tcp",
					 PeerAddr  => $host,
					 PeerPort  => "http(80)",
				        );
	unless ($remote) { die "cannot connect to http daemon on $host" }
	$remote->autoflush(1);
	print $remote "GET $document HTTP/1.0" . $BLANK;
	while ( <$remote> ) { print }
	close $remote;
    }

The web server handing the "http" service, which is assumed to be at its standard port, number 80. If the web server you're trying to connect to is at a different port (like 1080 or 8080), you should specify as the named-parameter pair, PeerPort => 8080. The autoflush method is used on the socket because otherwise the system would buffer up the output we sent it. (If you're on a Mac, you'll also need to change every "\n" in your code that sends data over the network to be a "\015\012" instead.)

Connecting to the server is only the first part of the process: once you have the connection, you have to use the server's language. Each server on the network has its own little command language that it expects as input. The string that we send to the server starting with "GET" is in HTTP syntax. In this case, we simply request each specified document. Yes, we really are making a new connection for each document, even though it's the same host. That's the way you always used to have to speak HTTP. Recent versions of web browsers may request that the remote server leave the connection open a little while, but the server doesn't have to honor such a request.

Here's an example of running that program, which we'll call webget:

% webget www.perl.com /guanaco.html
HTTP/1.1 404 File Not Found
Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 18:02:32 GMT
Server: Apache/1.2b6
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html

<HEAD><TITLE>404 File Not Found</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY><H1>File Not Found</H1>
The requested URL /guanaco.html was not found on this server.<P>
</BODY>

Ok, so that's not very interesting, because it didn't find that particular document. But a long response wouldn't have fit on this page.

For a more fully-featured version of this program, you should look to the lwp-request program included with the LWP modules from CPAN.

Interactive Client with IO::Socket

Well, that's all fine if you want to send one command and get one answer, but what about setting up something fully interactive, somewhat like the way telnet works? That way you can type a line, get the answer, type a line, get the answer, etc.

This client is more complicated than the two we've done so far, but if you're on a system that supports the powerful fork call, the solution isn't that rough. Once you've made the connection to whatever service you'd like to chat with, call fork to clone your process. Each of these two identical process has a very simple job to do: the parent copies everything from the socket to standard output, while the child simultaneously copies everything from standard input to the socket. To accomplish the same thing using just one process would be much harder, because it's easier to code two processes to do one thing than it is to code one process to do two things. (This keep-it-simple principle a cornerstones of the Unix philosophy, and good software engineering as well, which is probably why it's spread to other systems.)

Here's the code:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use strict;
    use IO::Socket;
    my ($host, $port, $kidpid, $handle, $line);

    unless (@ARGV == 2) { die "usage: $0 host port" }
    ($host, $port) = @ARGV;

    # create a tcp connection to the specified host and port
    $handle = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto     => "tcp",
				    PeerAddr  => $host,
				    PeerPort  => $port)
	   or die "can't connect to port $port on $host: $!";

    $handle->autoflush(1);		# so output gets there right away
    print STDERR "[Connected to $host:$port]\n";

    # split the program into two processes, identical twins
    die "can't fork: $!" unless defined($kidpid = fork());

    # the if{} block runs only in the parent process
    if ($kidpid) {
	# copy the socket to standard output
	while (defined ($line = <$handle>)) {
	    print STDOUT $line;
	}
	kill("TERM", $kidpid);  		# send SIGTERM to child
    }
    # the else{} block runs only in the child process
    else {
	# copy standard input to the socket
	while (defined ($line = <STDIN>)) {
	    print $handle $line;
	}
    }

The kill function in the parent's if block is there to send a signal to our child process (current running in the else block) as soon as the remote server has closed its end of the connection.

If the remote server sends data a byte at time, and you need that data immediately without waiting for a newline (which might not happen), you may wish to replace the while loop in the parent with the following:

    my $byte;
    while (sysread($handle, $byte, 1) == 1) {
	print STDOUT $byte;
    }

Making a system call for each byte you want to read is not very efficient (to put it mildly) but is the simplest to explain and works reasonably well.

TCP Servers with IO::Socket

As always, setting up a server is little bit more involved than running a client. The model is that the server creates a special kind of socket that does nothing but listen on a particular port for incoming connections. It does this by calling the IO::Socket::INET->new() method with slightly different arguments than the client did.

Proto: This is which protocol to use. Like our clients, we'll still specify "tcp" here.
LocalPort: We specify a local port in the LocalPort argument, which we didn't do for the client. This is service name or port number for which you want to be the server. (Under Unix, ports under 1024 are restricted to the superuser.) In our sample, we'll use port 9000, but you can use any port that's not currently in use on your system. If you try to use one already in used, you'll get an "Address already in use" message. Under Unix, the netstat -a command will show which services current have servers.
Listen: The Listen parameter is set to the maximum number of pending connections we can accept until we turn away incoming clients. Think of it as a call-waiting queue for your telephone. The low-level Socket module has a special symbol for the system maximum, which is SOMAXCONN.
Reuse: The Reuse parameter is needed so that we restart our server manually without waiting a few minutes to allow system buffers to clear out.

Once the generic server socket has been created using the parameters listed above, the server then waits for a new client to connect to it. The server blocks in the accept method, which eventually accepts a bidirectional connection from the remote client. (Make sure to autoflush this handle to circumvent buffering.)

To add to user-friendliness, our server prompts the user for commands. Most servers don't do this. Because of the prompt without a newline, you'll have to use the sysread variant of the interactive client above.

This server accepts one of five different commands, sending output back to the client. Note that unlike most network servers, this one only handles one incoming client at a time. Multithreaded servers are covered in Chapter 6 of the Camel.

Here's the code. We'll

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use IO::Socket;
use Net::hostent;		# for OO version of gethostbyaddr

$PORT = 9000;			# pick something not in use

$server = IO::Socket::INET->new( Proto     => 'tcp',
                                 LocalPort => $PORT,
                                 Listen    => SOMAXCONN,
                                 Reuse     => 1);

die "can't setup server" unless $server;
print "[Server $0 accepting clients]\n";

while ($client = $server->accept()) {
  $client->autoflush(1);
  print $client "Welcome to $0; type help for command list.\n";
  $hostinfo = gethostbyaddr($client->peeraddr);
  printf "[Connect from %s]\n", $hostinfo ? $hostinfo->name : $client->peerhost;
  print $client "Command? ";
  while ( <$client>) {
    next unless /\S/;	     # blank line
    if    (/quit|exit/i)    { last;                                     }
    elsif (/date|time/i)    { printf $client "%s\n", scalar localtime;  }
    elsif (/who/i )         { print  $client `who 2>&1`;                }
    elsif (/cookie/i )      { print  $client `/usr/games/fortune 2>&1`; }
    elsif (/motd/i )        { print  $client `cat /etc/motd 2>&1`;      }
    else {
      print $client "Commands: quit date who cookie motd\n";
    }
  } continue {
     print $client "Command? ";
  }
  close $client;
}

UDP: Message Passing

Another kind of client-server setup is one that uses not connections, but messages. UDP communications involve much lower overhead but also provide less reliability, as there are no promises that messages will arrive at all, let alone in order and unmangled. Still, UDP offers some advantages over TCP, including being able to "broadcast" or "multicast" to a whole bunch of destination hosts at once (usually on your local subnet). If you find yourself overly concerned about reliability and start building checks into your message system, then you probably should use just TCP to start with.

Note that UDP datagrams are not a bytestream and should not be treated as such. This makes using I/O mechanisms with internal buffering like stdio (i.e. print() and friends) especially cumbersome. Use syswrite(), or better send(), like in the example below.

Here's a UDP program similar to the sample Internet TCP client given earlier. However, instead of checking one host at a time, the UDP version will check many of them asynchronously by simulating a multicast and then using select() to do a timed-out wait for I/O. To do something similar with TCP, you'd have to use a different socket handle for each host.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    use strict;
    use Socket;
    use Sys::Hostname;

    my ( $count, $hisiaddr, $hispaddr, $histime,
	 $host, $iaddr, $paddr, $port, $proto,
	 $rin, $rout, $rtime, $SECS_of_70_YEARS);

    $SECS_of_70_YEARS      = 2208988800;

    $iaddr = gethostbyname(hostname());
    $proto = getprotobyname('udp');
    $port = getservbyname('time', 'udp');
    $paddr = sockaddr_in(0, $iaddr); # 0 means let kernel pick

    socket(SOCKET, PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, $proto)   || die "socket: $!";
    bind(SOCKET, $paddr)                          || die "bind: $!";

    $| = 1;
    printf "%-12s %8s %s\n",  "localhost", 0, scalar localtime time;
    $count = 0;
    for $host (@ARGV) {
	$count++;
	$hisiaddr = inet_aton($host) 	|| die "unknown host";
	$hispaddr = sockaddr_in($port, $hisiaddr);
	defined(send(SOCKET, 0, 0, $hispaddr))    || die "send $host: $!";
    }

    $rin = '';
    vec($rin, fileno(SOCKET), 1) = 1;

    # timeout after 10.0 seconds
    while ($count && select($rout = $rin, undef, undef, 10.0)) {
	$rtime = '';
	($hispaddr = recv(SOCKET, $rtime, 4, 0)) 	|| die "recv: $!";
	($port, $hisiaddr) = sockaddr_in($hispaddr);
	$host = gethostbyaddr($hisiaddr, AF_INET);
	$histime = unpack("N", $rtime) - $SECS_of_70_YEARS;
	printf "%-12s ", $host;
	printf "%8d %s\n", $histime - time, scalar localtime($histime);
	$count--;
    }

Note that this example does not include any retries and may consequently fail to contact a reachable host. The most prominent reason for this is congestion of the queues on the sending host if the number of list of hosts to contact is sufficiently large.

SysV IPC

While System V IPC isn't so widely used as sockets, it still has some interesting uses. You can't, however, effectively use SysV IPC or Berkeley mmap() to have shared memory so as to share a variable amongst several processes. That's because Perl would reallocate your string when you weren't wanting it to.

Here's a small example showing shared memory usage.

use IPC::SysV qw(IPC_PRIVATE IPC_RMID S_IRUSR S_IWUSR);

$size = 2000;
$id = shmget(IPC_PRIVATE, $size, S_IRUSR|S_IWUSR) // die "$!";
print "shm key $id\n";

$message = "Message #1";
shmwrite($id, $message, 0, 60) || die "$!";
print "wrote: '$message'\n";
shmread($id, $buff, 0, 60) || die "$!";
print "read : '$buff'\n";

# the buffer of shmread is zero-character end-padded.
substr($buff, index($buff, "\0")) = '';
print "un" unless $buff eq $message;
print "swell\n";

print "deleting shm $id\n";
shmctl($id, IPC_RMID, 0) || die "$!";

Here's an example of a semaphore:

use IPC::SysV qw(IPC_CREAT);

$IPC_KEY = 1234;
$id = semget($IPC_KEY, 10, 0666 | IPC_CREAT ) // die "$!";
print "shm key $id\n";

Put this code in a separate file to be run in more than one process. Call the file take:

# create a semaphore

$IPC_KEY = 1234;
$id = semget($IPC_KEY,  0 , 0 );
die if !defined($id);

$semnum = 0;
$semflag = 0;

# 'take' semaphore
# wait for semaphore to be zero
$semop = 0;
$opstring1 = pack("s!s!s!", $semnum, $semop, $semflag);

# Increment the semaphore count
$semop = 1;
$opstring2 = pack("s!s!s!", $semnum, $semop,  $semflag);
$opstring = $opstring1 . $opstring2;

semop($id,$opstring) || die "$!";

Put this code in a separate file to be run in more than one process. Call this file give:

# 'give' the semaphore
# run this in the original process and you will see
# that the second process continues

$IPC_KEY = 1234;
$id = semget($IPC_KEY, 0, 0);
die if !defined($id);

$semnum = 0;
$semflag = 0;

# Decrement the semaphore count
$semop = -1;
$opstring = pack("s!s!s!", $semnum, $semop, $semflag);

semop($id,$opstring) || die "$!";

The SysV IPC code above was written long ago, and it's definitely clunky looking. For a more modern look, see the IPC::SysV module which is included with Perl starting from Perl 5.005.

A small example demonstrating SysV message queues:

use IPC::SysV qw(IPC_PRIVATE IPC_RMID IPC_CREAT S_IRUSR S_IWUSR);

my $id = msgget(IPC_PRIVATE, IPC_CREAT | S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR);

my $sent = "message";
my $type_sent = 1234;
my $rcvd;
my $type_rcvd;

if (defined $id) {
    if (msgsnd($id, pack("l! a*", $type_sent, $sent), 0)) {
        if (msgrcv($id, $rcvd, 60, 0, 0)) {
            ($type_rcvd, $rcvd) = unpack("l! a*", $rcvd);
            if ($rcvd eq $sent) {
                print "okay\n";
            } else {
                print "not okay\n";
            }
        } else {
            die "# msgrcv failed\n";
        }
    } else {
        die "# msgsnd failed\n";
    }
    msgctl($id, IPC_RMID, 0) || die "# msgctl failed: $!\n";
} else {
    die "# msgget failed\n";
}

NOTES

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;

BUGS

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.

AUTHOR

Tom Christiansen, with occasional vestiges of Larry Wall's original version and suggestions from the Perl Porters.

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