Provided by: perl-doc_5.40.1-5_all 
NAME
perlfork - Perl's fork() emulation
SYNOPSIS
NOTE: As of the 5.8.0 release, fork() emulation has considerably
matured. However, there are still a few known bugs and differences
from real fork() that might affect you. See the "BUGS" and
"CAVEATS AND LIMITATIONS" sections below.
Perl provides a fork() keyword that corresponds to the Unix system call of the same name. On most Unix-
like platforms where the fork() system call is available, Perl's fork() simply calls it.
On some platforms such as Windows where the fork() system call is not available, Perl can be built to
emulate fork() at the interpreter level. While the emulation is designed to be as compatible as possible
with the real fork() at the level of the Perl program, there are certain important differences that stem
from the fact that all the pseudo child "processes" created this way live in the same real process as far
as the operating system is concerned.
This document provides a general overview of the capabilities and limitations of the fork() emulation.
Note that the issues discussed here are not applicable to platforms where a real fork() is available and
Perl has been configured to use it.
DESCRIPTION
The fork() emulation is implemented at the level of the Perl interpreter. What this means in general is
that running fork() will actually clone the running interpreter and all its state, and run the cloned
interpreter in a separate thread, beginning execution in the new thread just after the point where the
fork() was called in the parent. We will refer to the thread that implements this child "process" as the
pseudo-process.
To the Perl program that called fork(), all this is designed to be transparent. The parent returns from
the fork() with a pseudo-process ID that can be subsequently used in any process-manipulation functions;
the child returns from the fork() with a value of 0 to signify that it is the child pseudo-process.
Behavior of other Perl features in forked pseudo-processes
Most Perl features behave in a natural way within pseudo-processes.
$$ or $PROCESS_ID
This special variable is correctly set to the pseudo-process ID. It can be used to identify
pseudo-processes within a particular session. Note that this value is subject to recycling if
any pseudo-processes are launched after others have been wait()-ed on.
%ENV Each pseudo-process maintains its own virtual environment. Modifications to %ENV affect the
virtual environment, and are only visible within that pseudo-process, and in any processes (or
pseudo-processes) launched from it.
chdir() and all other builtins that accept filenames
Each pseudo-process maintains its own virtual idea of the current directory. Modifications to
the current directory using chdir() are only visible within that pseudo-process, and in any
processes (or pseudo-processes) launched from it. All file and directory accesses from the
pseudo-process will correctly map the virtual working directory to the real working directory
appropriately.
wait() and waitpid()
wait() and waitpid() can be passed a pseudo-process ID returned by fork(). These calls will
properly wait for the termination of the pseudo-process and return its status.
kill() "kill('KILL', ...)" can be used to terminate a pseudo-process by passing it the ID returned by
fork(). The outcome of kill on a pseudo-process is unpredictable and it should not be used except
under dire circumstances, because the operating system may not guarantee integrity of the process
resources when a running thread is terminated. The process which implements the pseudo-processes
can be blocked and the Perl interpreter hangs. Note that using "kill('KILL', ...)" on a
pseudo-process() may typically cause memory leaks, because the thread that implements the pseudo-
process does not get a chance to clean up its resources.
"kill('TERM', ...)" can also be used on pseudo-processes, but the signal will not be delivered
while the pseudo-process is blocked by a system call, e.g. waiting for a socket to connect, or
trying to read from a socket with no data available. Starting in Perl 5.14 the parent process
will not wait for children to exit once they have been signalled with "kill('TERM', ...)" to
avoid deadlock during process exit. You will have to explicitly call waitpid() to make sure the
child has time to clean-up itself, but you are then also responsible that the child is not
blocking on I/O either.
exec() Calling exec() within a pseudo-process actually spawns the requested executable in a separate
process and waits for it to complete before exiting with the same exit status as that process.
This means that the process ID reported within the running executable will be different from what
the earlier Perl fork() might have returned. Similarly, any process manipulation functions
applied to the ID returned by fork() will affect the waiting pseudo-process that called exec(),
not the real process it is waiting for after the exec().
When exec() is called inside a pseudo-process then DESTROY methods and END blocks will still be
called after the external process returns.
exit() exit() always exits just the executing pseudo-process, after automatically wait()-ing for any
outstanding child pseudo-processes. Note that this means that the process as a whole will not
exit unless all running pseudo-processes have exited. See below for some limitations with open
filehandles.
Open handles to files, directories and network sockets
All open handles are dup()-ed in pseudo-processes, so that closing any handles in one process
does not affect the others. See below for some limitations.
Resource limits
In the eyes of the operating system, pseudo-processes created via the fork() emulation are simply threads
in the same process. This means that any process-level limits imposed by the operating system apply to
all pseudo-processes taken together. This includes any limits imposed by the operating system on the
number of open file, directory and socket handles, limits on disk space usage, limits on memory size,
limits on CPU utilization etc.
Killing the parent process
If the parent process is killed (either using Perl's kill() builtin, or using some external means) all
the pseudo-processes are killed as well, and the whole process exits.
Lifetime of the parent process and pseudo-processes
During the normal course of events, the parent process and every pseudo-process started by it will wait
for their respective pseudo-children to complete before they exit. This means that the parent and every
pseudo-child created by it that is also a pseudo-parent will only exit after their pseudo-children have
exited.
Starting with Perl 5.14 a parent will not wait() automatically for any child that has been signalled with
"kill('TERM', ...)" to avoid a deadlock in case the child is blocking on I/O and never receives the
signal.
CAVEATS AND LIMITATIONS
BEGIN blocks
The fork() emulation will not work entirely correctly when called from within a BEGIN block. The
forked copy will run the contents of the BEGIN block, but will not continue parsing the source
stream after the BEGIN block. For example, consider the following code:
BEGIN {
fork and exit; # fork child and exit the parent
print "inner\n";
}
print "outer\n";
This will print:
inner
rather than the expected:
inner
outer
This limitation arises from fundamental technical difficulties in cloning and restarting the
stacks used by the Perl parser in the middle of a parse.
Open filehandles
Any filehandles open at the time of the fork() will be dup()-ed. Thus, the files can be closed
independently in the parent and child, but beware that the dup()-ed handles will still share the
same seek pointer. Changing the seek position in the parent will change it in the child and
vice-versa. One can avoid this by opening files that need distinct seek pointers separately in
the child.
On some operating systems, notably Solaris and Unixware, calling exit() from a child process will
flush and close open filehandles in the parent, thereby corrupting the filehandles. On these
systems, calling _exit() is suggested instead. _exit() is available in Perl through the "POSIX"
module. Please consult your system's manpages for more information on this.
Open directory handles
Perl will completely read from all open directory handles until they reach the end of the stream.
It will then seekdir() back to the original location and all future readdir() requests will be
fulfilled from the cache buffer. That means that neither the directory handle held by the parent
process nor the one held by the child process will see any changes made to the directory after
the fork() call.
Note that rewinddir() has a similar limitation on Windows and will not force readdir() to read
the directory again either. Only a newly opened directory handle will reflect changes to the
directory.
Forking pipe open() not yet implemented
The "open(FOO, "|-")" and "open(BAR, "-|")" constructs are not yet implemented. This limitation
can be easily worked around in new code by creating a pipe explicitly. The following example
shows how to write to a forked child:
# simulate open(FOO, "|-")
sub pipe_to_fork ($) {
my $parent = shift;
pipe my $child, $parent or die;
my $pid = fork();
die "fork() failed: $!" unless defined $pid;
if ($pid) {
close $child;
}
else {
close $parent;
open(STDIN, "<&=" . fileno($child)) or die;
}
$pid;
}
if (pipe_to_fork('FOO')) {
# parent
print FOO "pipe_to_fork\n";
close FOO;
}
else {
# child
while (<STDIN>) { print; }
exit(0);
}
And this one reads from the child:
# simulate open(FOO, "-|")
sub pipe_from_fork ($) {
my $parent = shift;
pipe $parent, my $child or die;
my $pid = fork();
die "fork() failed: $!" unless defined $pid;
if ($pid) {
close $child;
}
else {
close $parent;
open(STDOUT, ">&=" . fileno($child)) or die;
}
$pid;
}
if (pipe_from_fork('BAR')) {
# parent
while (<BAR>) { print; }
close BAR;
}
else {
# child
print "pipe_from_fork\n";
exit(0);
}
Forking pipe open() constructs will be supported in future.
Global state maintained by XSUBs
External subroutines (XSUBs) that maintain their own global state may not work correctly. Such
XSUBs will either need to maintain locks to protect simultaneous access to global data from
different pseudo-processes, or maintain all their state on the Perl symbol table, which is copied
naturally when fork() is called. A callback mechanism that provides extensions an opportunity to
clone their state will be provided in the near future.
Interpreter embedded in larger application
The fork() emulation may not behave as expected when it is executed in an application which
embeds a Perl interpreter and calls Perl APIs that can evaluate bits of Perl code. This stems
from the fact that the emulation only has knowledge about the Perl interpreter's own data
structures and knows nothing about the containing application's state. For example, any state
carried on the application's own call stack is out of reach.
Thread-safety of extensions
Since the fork() emulation runs code in multiple threads, extensions calling into non-thread-safe
libraries may not work reliably when calling fork(). As Perl's threading support gradually
becomes more widely adopted even on platforms with a native fork(), such extensions are expected
to be fixed for thread-safety.
PORTABILITY CAVEATS
In portable Perl code, "kill(9, $child)" must not be used on forked processes. Killing a forked process
is unsafe and has unpredictable results. See "kill()", above.
BUGS
• Having pseudo-process IDs be negative integers breaks down for the integer -1 because the wait()
and waitpid() functions treat this number as being special. The tacit assumption in the current
implementation is that the system never allocates a thread ID of 1 for user threads. A better
representation for pseudo-process IDs will be implemented in future.
• In certain cases, the OS-level handles created by the pipe(), socket(), and accept() operators
are apparently not duplicated accurately in pseudo-processes. This only happens in some
situations, but where it does happen, it may result in deadlocks between the read and write ends
of pipe handles, or inability to send or receive data across socket handles.
• This document may be incomplete in some respects.
AUTHOR
Support for concurrent interpreters and the fork() emulation was implemented by ActiveState, with funding
from Microsoft Corporation.
This document is authored and maintained by Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@activestate.com>.
SEE ALSO
"fork" in perlfunc, perlipc
perl v5.40.1 2025-07-03 PERLFORK(1)