Multiple forks and IO:Pipe - perl

Question

I am trying to build a program wich creates some forks and writes the results of the forks back to the main program. Thereby I try to use IO::Pipe
sub ForkRequests {
my $pipe = IO::Pipe->new();
my $pid;
foreach my $feature ( #features ) {
if ( $pid = fork() ) {
$pipe->reader();
while ( <$pipe> ) {
print $_. "\n";
}
}
elsif ( defined $pid ) {
#child
$pipe->writer();
#somecalculations [...]
print $pipe $calcresults;
}
}
}
I got my code for doing a pipe from the module's documentation.
If i now try to execute, I get an error message
Can't locate object method "reader" via package "IO::Pipe::End" at lmtest3.pl line 56.
Can't locate object method "writer" via package "IO::Pipe::End" at lmtest3.pl line 63.
Can't locate object method "reader" via package "IO::Pipe::End" at lmtest3.pl line 56, <GEN0> line 1.
Can't locate object method "writer" via package "IO::Pipe::End" at lmtest3.pl line 63, <GEN0> line 1.
So, my code does not seem to initiate a pipe object, but an IO::Pipe::End.
So my question is, can anybody see the mistake in there? Why does it return the wrong object, and how would this be done correctly?
EDIT
I have some requests to some servers (most of the time 1 request to 7 ervers).
Those request names are saved in #features, and will be executed at the point of #somecalculations.
Because the server response is pretty slow, I want those requests to start in parallel. They all have to get back to the main program and print the reply to the console.
I tried this code
sub ForkRequests {
my $i = 0;
my #pipes;
my $pid;
foreach my $feature ( #features ) {
#pipes[$i] = IO::Pipe->new();
if ( $pid = fork() ) {
#pipes[$i]->reader();
}
elsif ( defined $pid ) {
#child
#pipes[$i]->writer();
# calculations
my $w = #pipes[$i];
print $w $calc;
print $w "end\n";
}
$i++;
}
}
if ( $pid == 1 ) {
while ( 1 ) {
foreach my $pipe ( #pipes ) {
while ( <$pipe> ) {
unless ( $_ == "end" ) {
print $_. "\n";
}
else { last; }
}
}
}
}
else {
exit;
}
}
as said, to save those pipes, but I still got a problem in reading them, as the program exits before it gets answers.

Answer 1

The problem is that you are forking multiple child processes but trying to use the same pipe for all of them.
The reader method converts $pipe into an IO::Pipe::End object that you can read data from, so the first child is connected correctly. But you then call reader again on the same $pipe, and the error is thrown because it is no longer an object of the right class.
You simply need to create a new pipe for each child process:
sub fork_requests {
for my $feature ( #features ) {
my $pipe = IO::Pipe->new;
my $pid;
if ( $pid = fork ) {
$pipe->reader;
print while <$pipe>;
}
elsif ( defined $pid ) {
$pipe->writer;
# some calculations . . .
print $pipe $calcresults;
exit;
}
}
}
Update
Okay I think I understand what it is you need. This complete program should show you.
I have written fork_requests so that it expects a list of features as parameters, and I have written the child code so that it sleeps for two seconds to emulate the processing time and then simply prints the name of the feature.
The parent code stores all the pipes in an array, as I suggested, and prints the output from each of them in the order they were queued. All five child processes complete after two seconds, so the parent is suspended for that time and then prints the features originally passed in.
use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Pipe;
STDOUT->autoflush;
fork_requests('A' .. 'E');
sub fork_requests {
my #pipes;
for my $feature ( #_ ) {
my $pipe = IO::Pipe->new;
my $pid;
if ( $pid = fork ) {
$pipe->reader;
push #pipes, $pipe;
}
elsif ( defined $pid ) {
$pipe->writer;
select $pipe;
# some calculations . . .
sleep 2;
my $calcresults = $feature;
print $calcresults, "\n";
exit;
}
}
for my $pipe ( #pipes ) {
print while <$pipe>;
}
}
output
A
B
C
D
E