This bug appears to still be active.
In IPC::Open3.pm, version 1.0101, line 188/189, there is the following
code.
exec @cmd
or croak "open3: exec of @cmd failed";
This code is executed after the process has forked. This has the large
problem that if you run the code in an eval block, your child process will
break out to the top of the block rather than die.
This caused a big problem for us, because we have code that runs in a
loop and executes functions in eval blocks. The parent process was
executing
an open3 command and the program to run wasn't in the path. The exec
in the child process failed and the child process dropped back to the
end of the eval in the loop. The parent sat waiting for the child to
terminate, and the child kept running in the loop. The next phase of
the loop caused the same problem, and this kept happening until we had
40 copies of the application running and the server ran out of memory.
An easy solution to this problem is to make line 188 of Open3.pm print
the error to STDERR and call exit rather than calling croak. The Open3
caller can then check the STDERR for the error.
