In the child code, you must also close all the pipes to the connection socket that were opened by the parent process (i.e., STDIN and STDOUT) and inherited by the child, so the parent will be able to complete the request and free itself for serving other requests. If you need the STDIN and/or STDOUTstreams, you should reopen them. You may need to close or reopen the STDERR file handle, too. As inherited from its parent, it's opened to append to the error_log file, so the chances are that you will want to leave it untouched.

Under mod_perl, the spawned process also inherits the file descriptor that's tied to the socket through which all the communications between the server and the client pass. Therefore, you need to free this stream in the forked process. If you don't, the server can't be restarted while the spawned process is still running. If you attempt to restart the server, you will get the following error:

[Mon May 20 23:04:11 2002] [crit] 
(98)Address already in use: make_sock:
  could not bind to address 127.0.0.1 port 8000

Apache::SubProcess comes to help, providing a method called cleanup_for_exec( ) that takes care of closing this file descriptor.

The simplest way to free the parent process is to close the STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERRstreams (if you don't need them) and untie the Apache socket. If the mounted partition is to be unmounted at a later time, in addition you may want to change the current directory of the forked process to / so that the forked process won't keep the mounted partition busy.

To summarize all these issues, here is an example of a fork that takes care of freeing the parent process (Example 10-14).

Example 10-14. fork2.pl

use Apache::SubProcess;
defined (my $kid = fork) or die "Cannot fork: $!\n";
if ($kid) {
    # Parent runs this block
}
else {
    # Child runs this block
    $r->cleanup_for_exec( ); # untie the socket
    chdir '/' or die "Can't chdir to /: $!";
    close STDIN;
    close STDOUT;
    close STDERR;

    # some code goes here

    CORE::exit(0);
}
# possibly more code here usually run by the parent

Of course, the real code should be placed between freeing the parent code and the child process termination.