Getting exit status from forked script

[hotshot]

Hello all!

I doing something as follows to run an external script with timeout on it + catching it's STDOUT:

eval {
     alarm($timeout);

     pipe(READ,WRITE);
     if ($pid = fork)  {
        $SIG{CHLD} = sub { 1 while (waitpid(-1, WNOHANG)) > 0};
        close(WRITE);
     }
     else  {
        die "Cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
        open(STDOUT, ">&=WRITE") or die "Cannot redirect STDOUT: $!";
        close(READ);
        exec ("$extScript") or die "Cannot exec $extScript: $!";
     }
     while(<READ>)  {
     push(@output, $_);  }

     close(READ);
     alarm(0);

};  ## End eval

if ($@)  {
   if ($@ =~ /Timeout/)  {
     print "Reached timeout\n";
   } else {
     alarm(0);
     die;
   }
} else {
  print Dumper(\@output);
}

That's working fine.

The question is how can I get the exit status of the script if it was finished before reached timeout.

Thanks

[Abigail-II]

The exit value will be available in $? after you've reaped the process with waitpid. The manual of waitpid could have told you that as well.

Abigail

[Ao]

It looks like you've taken the main if($pid=fork) - else code from the Perl Cookbook 16.10 but you've forgotten about waitpid. Either go back to the Cookbook and look closer or use perldoc -f waitpid to read up on its use. 'tis pretty straight-forward.