Test2::...e::Fork(3pm)

okay bestie, welcome to the Test2::...e::Fork(3pm) page from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide — this is the manual for Test2::Require::Fork, and it is literally giving “skip the whole test file if forking isn’t a thing here” energy 💅✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

• Test2::Require::Fork — skip a test file unless the system supports forking 🫶

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

It’s fairly common to write tests that need to fork. But not all systems support forking. This library does the hard work of checking if forking is supported on the current system. If forking is not supported, then this will skip all tests and exit true. No cap 😭👑

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

use Test2::Require::Fork;

... Code that forks ...

🦋 EXPLANATION 🦋

The way that checking if the current system supports forking is not simple — here’s an example of how to do it:

use Config;

sub CAN_FORK {
    return 1 if $Config{d_fork};

    # Some platforms use ithreads to mimic forking
    return 0 unless $^O eq 'MSWin32' || $^O eq 'NetWare';
    return 0 unless $Config{useithreads};
    return 0 unless $Config{ccflags} =~ /-DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS/;

    # Threads are not reliable before 5.008001
    return 0 unless $] >= 5.008001;

    # Devel::Cover currently breaks with threads
    return 0 if $INC{'Devel/Cover.pm'};
    return 1;
}

Duplicating this non-trivial code in all tests that need to fork is error-prone. It is easy to forget bits, or get it wrong. On top of these checks, you also need to tell the harness that no tests should run and why. 😩💀

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• Test2::Require::RealFork — similar to this module, but it will skip on any perl that only has fork emulation 🧚
• Test2::Require::Threads — skip the test file if the system does not support threads 🪡

🔥 SOURCE 🔥

The source code repository for Test2-Suite can be found at https://github.com/Test-More/test-more/. Go give it a peek, bestie 👀💖

👑 MAINTAINERS 👑

• Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org> 💌

💜 AUTHORS 💜

• Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org> ✨

🌸 COPYRIGHT 🌸

Copyright Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org>.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ 🎀

---

mwah 💋 — this page came from source/version perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-11-03. periodt 💅