Fork Perl CGI sub into background and wait for it to finish.

1. You can use fork to split your process into two processes.
2. You can check the running processes to see if it is still running.  This will be OS dependent.  Which OS are you running?  You would use ps on unix.
3.  This should work within a CGI app.


eg:
#doing stuff....
SlowSub();
#do more stuff

sub SlowSub {
    #Call fork
    my $pid=fork;
    #Display error message if not successful
    die "Could not fork: $!\n" unless defined($pid);

    #parent returns immediately
    return if $pid;

    #Only child runs here
    #Do stuff that is slow

    #Child exits
    exit;
}

Thank you, I will give this a try today.

This is running on an IBM AIX (Unix) system.

Currently in my SlowSub I check a lot of things for errors and if it failes I return from the sub with some error code...  If I'm running SlowSub as a child process, I'm assuming I can't use return, only exit.  Is there someway I can detect that it exited due to an error instead of success?

I guess I could write some type of file somewhere and check for that, but is there a better way?

thx!

If it is possible for your SlowSub to do some error checking quickly, then you could have it only fork if thinks okay.
But the child will not be able to write to the web browser, anything it prints on STDOUT or STDERR will not be seen.  Logging to a file is the most common method.

I guess I'm doing this wrong... can you tell me?

my $forked = copyProdToDevView($p{'view_id'});

sub copyProdToDevView($)
{
   my $view_id = shift;

   my %msg;
   $msg{'ERR'} = 0;

   # this can take a long time, so run it as a child process
   my $pid = fork;
   if (!defined($pid))
   {
      $msg{'ERR'} = 1;
      $msg{'TXT'} = qq{Could not create child process for data import into view. $!};
      return \%msg;
   }
   else
   {
      $msg{'TXT'} = $pid;
      return \%msg;
   }

   my $dbhP = dbconnect('scully');

   my $sql_P_edit_type = qq{
      select   type_id,
               name,
               sequence
      from     ${dbtablePrefix}_ec_edit_type
      where    view_id = ? };

   my $sql_D_edit_type = qq{
      insert into ${dbtablePrefix}_ec_edit_type
      (type_id, name, sequence, view_id)
      values(?, ?, ?, ?) };

   $dbhP->disconnect();
   exit;
}

That makes sense, I will use file logging or maybe use a db table...  I guess I just need help with the above now...