Re: How to preserve the value of STDIN

[chromatic]

If you can copy STDIN before anything reads from it, you might have luck. The following code works for me under Linux:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

open (NEWIN, "<&STDIN") or die "$!";
open (STDIN, "/dev/null");
print while (<NEWIN>);

I saved it as 'dup.pl' and called it with cat dup.pl | ./dup.pl.

(Find out about <& at open.)

Of course, you can pass a reference to a typeglob containing the NEWIN fh to the CGI.pm constructor...

[Fastolfe]

This is still only a one-shot deal. <STDIN> now immediately returns an EOF (since we're reading from /dev/null now) as will any subsequent read from <NEWIN> (since we've read everything from what was once STDIN). We're not gaining anything here, in other words. He needs his in-house stuff to parse STDIN *as well* as CGI.pm. Both of them are written to read from STDIN, and only the first will succeed.

If this were a normal file handle, we could seek(STDIN, 0, 0) to return it to a sane, starting state, but you can't do this with STDIN, because it's actually more like a pipe than a file.