IPC::Filter(3pm)

💖 IPC::Filter — the manual, but make it a group chat 💖

okay bestie, so IPC::Filter is a Perl module — yeah, that (3pm) situation — and its whole thing is filtering data through an external process. That's the NAME, that's the vibe, that's the whole personality. 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

use IPC::Filter qw(filter);

$compressed_data = filter($data, "bzip2");

that's it. that's the moment. you import filter, you hand it your data and a command, and it hands you back the glow-up version. 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the filter function that this module ships passes your data through an external command. why does that matter? because it gives you filtering in non-pipeline situations — i.e. when you're not sitting in a shell going | | | like it's a whole thing. you just call it from Perl and it does the pipe work for you. no cap. 🫶

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🎀 FUNCTIONS 🎀

filter(DATA, SHELL_COMMAND)

filter(DATA, PROGRAM, ARGS ...)

okay so here's the tea. ☕

• The SHELL_COMMAND, or the PROGRAM with ARGS if you supplied more arguments, gets executed as a separate process. it's giving "spawn a whole little guy and make it do your bidding."
• lowkey important: the arguments other than DATA are ultimately passed to exec. so if you wanna know how it decides between those two forms, go read "exec" in perlfunc(1) — it explains the choice. iykyk. 📖
• the DATA — which must be either a simple string or a reference to a string — gets supplied to the process on its standard input.
• then the process's standard output is captured and returned, as a simple string. so you get your result back like a little gift. 🎁
• and if the process exits with a non-zero exit code, or on a signal, the function will die. 😭 yes really. dramatic but fair.
  • in the case of a non-zero exit code, the die message will duplicate the process's standard error output — so you actually see what went wrong.
  • in any other case, the error output is discarded. gone. thrown away. not even a text back. 💀

bestie heads up: DATA being neither a simple string nor a reference to a string is not a vibe this function accepts. string or string-ref, periodt.

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• IPC::Open2

go look, it's the cousin. 🧚

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org> — the icon who wrote this. 🫡

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📜 COPYRIGHT 📜

Copyright (C) 2004, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2017 Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org>

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💜 LICENSE 💜

this module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. slay, honestly. ✨

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and that's the whole page, bestie — brought to you by perl v5.36.0, dated 2022-11-19, filed under IPC::Filter(3pm). mwah. 💖🎀🦋