I've encounted what I believe to be an error in either a) FileHandle.pm, b) Perl, or c) Linux 2.2.17. I'm writing a bulkmailer (for legitimate resons). I dump all the emails to a file sorted by domain. My parent process begins reading the file and forks a "domain processor" whenever it encounter a '--mlm:', which seperates the domains. The domain processor then begins reading where the parent stopped, since it in herited the parents filehandle. Meanwhile the parent process beings looking for the next '--mlm:' line. This is where the error occurs... The "domain processor", which is reading the data from the filehandle line by line, seems to skip 2048, 4096, or 8192 bytes at seemingly random intervals. I think that when I fork, I'm getting a copy of the file descriptor, but not a copy of the buffer. Then, when my parent process moves on to the next 2k, 4k, or 8k block, the kernel cleans up that memory even though my "domain processor" is still reading from it. I'd think that this would cause a core dump, but I'm not seeing any core files and my exit codes all look clean. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be the problem? In the short term, I will open a new file handle within the "domain processor" and use tell and seek which should work just as well... Thanks, Rob -- Warning: The contents of this message are made of bits which may or may not be an accurate representation of my thoughts.
