[HRPM] Class Plan

[chicks at chicks.net]

On Sun, 28 May 2000, Terry wrote:
> Hey guys, looks like you are doing a great job with the class...

I'm pleased.  We've re-ordered things and cut and added material enough
that it's gone smoother than my 9-5 M-F classes went.  Sometime within the
next couple of weeks the class slides are going to be cleaned up and
posted on the site.

> I have a request however about more advanced instruction... I am
> interested in learning more about spawning child processes and how the
> parent-child relationship can be used.... 

That will be covered as part of the sockets discussion in class.  I'm
planning on showing traditional and pre-forked TCP server examples.  A
healthy discussion of fork and exec are required for that.

> also i would like to see something about wrapping perl code around
> other programs/processes and how those can be manipulated by the
> wrapper.....  maybe we can discuss these more during the regular
> meeting times, but i am truely interested in learning more about
> these....

If you don't require bidirectional communication with an app, it's pretty
simple to send it a stream or take it's output and turn it into a file
handle.  For instance:
	open (WHOIS,"whois chicks.net at whois.networksolutions.com|") or die;
will give you a file handle to read the output of whois or
	open (CHPASS,"|chpasswd") or die;
will give you a file handle to write to change people's passwords via
chpasswd.

There are some more advanced examples in the /Perl Cookbook/.  Over time,
we're covering most of the /Cookbook/ material at HRPM meetings.

-- 
</chris>

Q. What's the difference between Batman and Bill Gates?
A. When Batman fought the Penguin, he won.