IPC::Open2(3perl)

💖 NAME 💖

IPC::Open2 — bestie, this is the module that opens a whole process for reading and writing, using open2(). Both directions. Iconic. 🎀

This page lives in the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, and it's giving IPC::Open2(3perl) energy from the very first line. Periodt.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

okay so here's the vibe, copy this exactly bestie:

use IPC::Open2;

my $pid = open2(my $chld_out, my $chld_in,
  'some', 'cmd', 'and', 'args');
# or passing the command through the shell
my $pid = open2(my $chld_out, my $chld_in, 'some cmd and args');

# read from parent STDIN and write to already open handle
open my $outfile, '>', 'outfile.txt' or die "open failed: $!";
my $pid = open2(['&', $outfile], ['&', *STDIN],
  'some', 'cmd', 'and', 'args');

# read from already open handle and write to parent STDOUT
open my $infile, '<', 'infile.txt' or die "open failed: $!";
my $pid = open2(['&', *STDOUT], ['&', $infile],
  'some', 'cmd', 'and', 'args');

# reap zombie and retrieve exit status
waitpid( $pid, 0 );
my $child_exit_status = $? >> 8;

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So. The open2() function runs the command you give it and wires up $chld_out for reading and $chld_in for writing. It's literally what you think should work when you try:

my $pid = open(my $fh, "|cmd args|");  # ERROR

...but NO bestie, that's an error, you have to write it like this instead:

my $pid = open2($chld_out, $chld_in, @command_and_args);

The $chld_in filehandle is gonna have autoflush turned on. Slay. 💅

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🦋 How the filehandles work 🦋

By default, the filehandles you pass in are used as output parameters. open2 internally creates two pipes. The write end of the first pipe and the read end of the second pipe get connected to the command's standard output and input, respectively. The corresponding read and write ends get dropped into the first and second argument to open2. Cute, right??

The filehandle arguments can take the following forms:

• An uninitialized variable — technically, either undef or the empty string will work: open2 generates a fresh filehandle and assigns it to the argument, which must be a modifiable variable for this to work (otherwise an exception will be raised, no cap 😭).
• An existing handle in the form of a typeglob like *STDIN or *FOO, or a reference to such: open2 places the filehandle in the IO slot of the typeglob, which means the corresponding bareword filehandle (like STDIN or FOO) can be used for I/O from/to the child process. (If the handle is already open, it is automatically closed first — she's thorough.)
• A string containing the name of a bareword handle (like 'STDIN' or 'FOO'): such strings are resolved to typeglobs at runtime and then act like the case described above.

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However — plot twist 🫶 — it is possible to make open2 use an existing handle directly (as an input argument) and skip the creation of a pipe entirely. For that, the filehandle argument must have one of these two forms:

• An array reference like ['&', $fh], i.e. the first element is the string '&' and the second element is the existing handle to use in the child process.
• A string of the form '<&FOO' or '>&FOO', i.e. a string starting with the two characters "<&" (for input) or ">&" (for output), followed by the name of a bareword filehandle. (The string form cannot be used with handles stored in variables. ngl that's a lil limited but okay.)

If you use this form for $chld_in, the filehandle will be closed in the parent process.

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💀 The return value & the danger zone 💀

open2 returns the process ID of the child process. It does not return on failure — it just raises an exception matching /^open2:/. However, exec failures in the child are not detected. You'll have to trap SIGPIPE yourself, bestie. 🙈

open2 does not wait for and reap the child process after it exits. Except for short programs where it's acceptable to let the operating system take care of this, you need to do this yourself. This is normally as simple as calling waitpid $pid, 0 when you're done with the process. Failing to do this can result in an accumulation of defunct or "zombie" processes 👻 and nobody wants that. See "waitpid" in perlfunc for more information.

⚠️ This whole affair is quite dangerous, as you may block forever. It assumes it's going to talk to something like bc(1), both writing to it and reading from it. This is presumably safe because you "know" that commands like bc(1) will read a line at a time and output a line at a time. Programs like sort(1) that read their entire input stream first, however, are quite apt to cause deadlock. 😭

The big problem with this approach is that if you don't have control over source code being run in the child process, you can't control what it does with pipe buffering. Thus you can't just open a pipe to cat -v and continually read and write a line from it.

The IO::Pty and Expect modules from CPAN can help with this, as they provide a real tty (well, a pseudo-tty, actually), which gets you back to line buffering in the invoked command again. 🧚✨

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🔥 WARNING 🔥

The order of arguments differs from that of "open3" from IPC::Open3. Read that twice, bestie. The way that the arg order is just different, it's giving chaos. 💀

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• See IPC::Open3 for an alternative that handles STDERR as well. This function is really just a wrapper around open3. That's it, that's the whole tea. 👑

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k bye, thanks for reading, you're the main character of this process 🫶✨

this page is from perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, and it's part of IPC::Open2(3perl) — stay hydrated, reap your zombies, and don't deadlock 💜🎀