fork messing up parent filehandle

D

darksaga

hi everybody,

i wrote a script where i use the fork command to speed up computation
of a program. the parent process spawns a limited number of children,
which process something. after a child process finishes its task a new
child is generated. this is repeated until the parent process reaches
the end of a file it runs through.

problem is that the fork command seems to mess up the parent filehandle
to my file, altough the children do not use this filehandle. when
looping through the file, the filehandle is magically reset to the
beginning of the file, or a position near the beginning. (see code
below)

i've read some other posts about the same prob. e.g.:
http://snipurl.com/s0pq
http://snipurl.com/s0ps
but there was no solution :/.

only thing was a workaround to read the file before forking into an
array, this solution is suboptimal for me coz my file could be >1GB.

sysnfo:
os: sun4u sparc 5.8
perl: v5.8.6 built for sun4-solaris

maybe there's someone out there, who knows a solution...

greets darksaga
____________________
#! /usr/bin/env perl -w
use strict;
use FileHandle;

my %children;
my $maxChildren = 10;
my $fileHandle = undef;

my $file = 'testFile';
createTestFile($file);

# start of main prog.
print "initial child spawning...\n";
for (1..$maxChildren)
{
if(my $line = getNextLine($file))
{
print "$line\n";
if(scalar(keys(%children)) < $maxChildren)
{
my $delay = int(rand 2)+1;
my $child = create_child($delay);
$children{$child} = "(slept $delay seconds)";
}
}
}
print "initial child spawning done...\n";

while(1) # loop until all done
{
my @pids = sort keys %children;
if (@pids)
{
#print "currently active children: @pids\n";
if(my $line = getNextLine($file))
{
print "$line\n";
if(scalar(keys(%children)) < $maxChildren)
{
my $delay = int(rand 2)+1;
my $child = create_child($delay);
$children{$child} = "(slept $delay seconds)";
}
}
}
else
{
print "all child processes are finished...\n";
}
if (($_ = wait) == -1)
{
print "wait() says no more children...\n";
last;
}
else
{
#print "child $_ has finished processing...". $children{$_} ."\n";
delete $children{$_};
}
}
print "parent is done...\n";


sub create_child
{
my ($delay) = @_;
my $pid = fork();
die "Unable to fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
return $pid if $pid; # Parent
child_routine($delay); # Child
die "Child $$ returned when it should have exited";
}

sub child_routine
{
my ($delay) = @_;
#print "Child $$ sleeping for $delay seconds\n";
sleep $delay;
#print "Child $$ exiting\n";
exit 0;
}

sub getNextLine
{
my ($fileName) = @_;
if (!$fileHandle)
{
$fileHandle = new FileHandle;
$fileHandle->open("< $fileName") or die $!;
}
my $entry = $fileHandle->getline();
unless($entry)
{
close $fileHandle;
return undef;
}
chomp($entry);
return $entry;
}

sub createTestFile
{
my ($fileName) = @_;
open(my $write, ">", "$file") or die $!;
for(1..30)
{
print $write "$_\n";
}
close $write;
}
 
P

Peter J. Holzer

darksaga said:
problem is that the fork command seems to mess up the parent filehandle
to my file, altough the children do not use this filehandle. when
looping through the file, the filehandle is magically reset to the
beginning of the file, or a position near the beginning. (see code
below)

Just for the record. I cannot replicate your problem on perl 5.8.4 on
Linux. The program prints:

----8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<---
initial child spawning...
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
initial child spawning done...
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
readline() on closed filehandle GEN0 at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/IO/Handle.pm line 1
all child processes are finished...
wait() says no more children...
parent is done...
----8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<---
which is what I expected. If you expected some different output, please
specify what you expected.

(I noticed a few other problems with your program - but they don't seem
to be related to the problem you describe, so I guess they are caused by
cutting down a real program down to a minimal test case)

hp
 
D

darksaga

problem won't occur on a linux system, seems to be sun solaris related.
just read the posts i've linked above, there problems also occured on
solaris machines only.
(I noticed a few other problems with your program - but they don't seem
to be related to the problem you describe, so I guess they are caused by
cutting down a real program down to a minimal test case)

jupp, just stripped testcode.
on a sun solaris machines you never get the "readline() on closed
filehandle" errorMsg,
coz the prog. is somehow caught in endless loop reading the file.

there seems to be some problem with the EOF detection of a file handle
on solaris machines. somehow the current filehandle position is
corrupted, me wonders why, and then is reset to a position near the
beginning of the file.

greetz

darksaga
 
X

xhoster

darksaga said:
hi everybody,

i wrote a script where i use the fork command to speed up computation
of a program. the parent process spawns a limited number of children,
which process something. after a child process finishes its task a new
child is generated. this is repeated until the parent process reaches
the end of a file it runs through.

problem is that the fork command seems to mess up the parent filehandle
to my file, altough the children do not use this filehandle. when
looping through the file, the filehandle is magically reset to the
beginning of the file, or a position near the beginning. (see code
below)

Solaris is buggy on closing forked file handles--when one copy closes
it screws up the other copies.

Change the child's exit to a POSIX::_exit. This bypasses the implicit
closing of the child's file handles.

Make sure you explicitly close all child's open file handles, other than
the ones shared with the parent, before calling _exit.

Xho
 
D

darksaga

Change the child's exit to a POSIX::_exit. This bypasses the implicit
closing of the child's file handles.

the POSIX::_exit() command solves the prob.

did some research about it, and found the following statement @ cpan:

"The exit() function does not always exit immediately. It calls any
defined END routines first, but these END routines may not themselves
abort the exit. Likewise any object destructors that need to be called
are called before the real exit. If this is a problem, you can call
POSIX:_exit($status) to avoid END and destructor processing. See
perlmod for details."

seems that these "defined END routines" close or somehow mess up the
filehandle of the parent process on solaris machines, if you call a
simple exit in one of your spawned child processes to end it. then its
seems to be reopened or shifted to somewhere near the beginning of your
file in the parent process. result is a endless loop.

tricky thing, imo. me wonders how a M$ os behaves ;-).

thanks @ Xho

greetz darksaga
 
P

Peter J. Holzer

Solaris is buggy on closing forked file handles--when one copy closes
it screws up the other copies.

This seems to be a rather severe violation of POSIX behaviour. Closing a
file descriptor in one process should never affect a file descriptor in
another process (unless they refer to opposite ends of a pipe or socket,
of course). Is this new in Solaris 10 or a long-standing Solaris bug?

hp
 
X

xhoster

Peter J. Holzer said:
This seems to be a rather severe violation of POSIX behaviour. Closing a
file descriptor in one process should never affect a file descriptor in
another process (unless they refer to opposite ends of a pipe or socket,
of course). Is this new in Solaris 10 or a long-standing Solaris bug?

Currently I can only test it on SunOS 5.8, but I think I've seen it
under older versions without really understanding what was going on.
(I have no idea what the difference is between Solaris and SunOS,
uname says SunOS while OSTYPE and perl -v say Solaris. If this
distinction is important, then take what I say with a grain of salt.)

Xho
 

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