Re: [cgiapp] Test 2 - is this thing on?

["Evan A. Zacks" <suppressed>]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 03:38:28PM -0500, Jason Purdy wrote:

> Since I'm posting, I'll add a lil' nugget I just gleamed.  We have a 
> utility script that may take a while to run, so I worked in a fork() 
> call, which meshes very well with cgiapp.  It helps that I don't need to 
> worry about the output of the script.
> 
> sub my_runmode {
>   my $self = shift;
>   my $query = $self->query();
>   $query->param( 'eid' ) =~ m%^(\d+)$%;
>   my $email_id = $1;
>   my $email = OTREmail->retrieve( $query->param( 'eid' ) );

Not sure if this was just typed into your email, or pasted from
actual code, but is there any reason you don't use the untainted
$email_id in your call to OTREmail->retrieve() ?

>   # forking off the email sending...
>   if ( my $pid = fork() ) {
>     # this is the parent, in which case, we don't need anything else
>     # ... Nothing to see here ...
>     # ... Move along! ...
>   } elsif( defined $pid ) {
>     # this is the child
>     close( STDOUT ); # so the parent can move on... :)
>     my $output = qx%./otr_sendemails.pl $email_id%;
>   } else {
>     die "Cannot fork off email thread: $!";
>   }
>   return $self->forward( 'start' );
> }

Should the child process exit after it's done running the
external process? Its return value ($self->forward()) won't be
seen by the end user. Perhaps consider using exec() to replace the
child process with the (possibly long-running) otr_sendemails.pl
script.

A similar technique (where the user sees a "pause" page while
waiting for the background process) is described in one of Randal
Schwartz's columns:

  http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col20.html

Make sure if you are running under mod_perl that you handle
forking as suggested in the mod_perl guide:

  http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html#Forking_and_Executing_Subprocesses_from_mod_perl


Thanks,
-E

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