Re: How do I fork a daemon process under Win32?

[tachyon]

You can use Win32::Console to fork a detached/daemon process. Here is a little alarm clock example. When it runs it pops a console and asks for a sleep time. It then detaches from the console which closes. Next it forks. The parent just exits whilst the child sleeps for x seconds, pops a new console window and prints a message (just to prove it is alive and kicking). This new console disappears when the child exits 5 seconds later.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Win32::Console;

my $con = Win32::Console->new();
$con->Display;
$con->Write("Sleep how many seconds? "); 
chomp(my $sleep = <STDIN>);
$con->Free(); # detache our script from the console which closes

# now let's fork of an alarm clock child
defined ( my $pid = fork() ) or die "Can't fork $!\n";
if ($pid) {
    exit;
} else {
    sleep $sleep;
    $con->Alloc() or die $!;
    $con->Write("BZZT - this is your wake up call");
    sleep 5;
    exit;
}