Question

I’m trying to use fork for the first time, so I can redirect the user’s web browser and then keep processing. I looked up the code for using fork, but my child process doesn’t execute (i.e., the file doesn’t get created). What am I doing wrong?

#! /usr/bin/perl 

if ($pid = fork) { } 
else { 
  close STDOUT(); 
  open(FILE,'>test.txt'); 
   print FILE time; 
  close(FILE); 
  exit(0); 
} 
print "Location: http://mydomain.com/\n\n";

Answer 1

STDOUT() makes Perl look for a function called STDOUT, and not finding one, aborts your child process.

$ perl -we 'close STDOUT()'
Undefined subroutine &main::STDOUT called at -e line 1.

You just need to say

close(STDOUT);

or

close STDOUT;

Even if you can only test this program in a web browser, the error message should still show up in the server error log.