Forking to an interactive program under mod_perl

["Alex Beamish" <suppressed>]

Hi,

I have described the challenge I'm facing in some detail here

  http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=589147

but essentially I want to launch Ghostscript in an interactive session, and talk to it interactively through a mod_perl request handler.

The code that I am trying to run (this is what calls Ghostscript) already works fine from the command line, but it uses IPC::Open2, something that mod_perl isn't happy with (it complains about not being able to find FILENO in Apache::RequestRec). I have bashed away at IPC::Run, because that seems to be the appropriate replacement under mod_perl, but for some reasons the pipe going to Ghostscript is never read by Ghostscript .. so no output is forthcoming.

I was also pointed to Expect, but that suffers from the same problem as IPC::Open2 -- mod_perl doesn't like it (it complains about not being able to find CLOSE in Apache::RequestRec). I've also looked into using Apache2::SubProcess, and that may be something I try in the future, but the server I'm working on is Apache 
1.3 so I don't believe that option is available to me.

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.

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario