Re: Forking to an interactive program under mod_perl

[Robert Landrum]

Alex Beamish wrote:
What I'm trying to do is come up with scaled page images from a PDF on 
the fly. Thus, I want to launch Ghostscript and then ask for a couple of 
page images. So, launching Ghostscript and getting the first page might 
happen on the first request; subsequent requests would come back to the 
Ghostscript session left running from the first request, and thus would 
be able to quickly produce the required page image.

Suggestions welcome.

What you're gonna need is a daemon that lives outside of mod_perl.  It's 
job will be to answer ghost script requests made from within your 
mod_perl handler, track open files, purge unused files, and generally do 
all the things you want to do.  I don't really see a clean way to do it 
otherwise.

I've never used it, but doing a CPAN search revealed GSAPI, a perl 
GhostScript interface.  That might be a good place to go.


Good luck,

Rob