reaper(3)

💖 reaper 💖

okay bestie, so this is reaper(3) from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section — like, a Perl module manual page, third section, you know the vibe 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

reaper — it's giving support for reaping child processes via $SIG{CHLD} 🌸

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

here's the whole vibe, copy it exactly bestie, no cap:

  use reaper qw( reaper reapPid pidStatus );

  my $pid = fork;
  if ( $pid == 0 ) { # child
    exec $some_command;
  }
  reapPid ( $pid );

  ...

  if ( defined(my $exit = pidStatus($pid)) ) {
    # child exited, check the code...
  }

like, you fork, the kid goes off and execs something, you reapPid($pid), and then later you check pidStatus($pid) and if it's defined the child has exited and you can peek at the code. iconic behaviour honestly 🔥

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the tea ☕ — reaper is just a backwards-compatibility wrapper for Reaper. that's literally it, that's the whole thing 🫶

the story? turns out only pragmas are supposed to be named in lower case, so the author renamed reaper to Reaper. periodt. but existing code out there still has use reaper all over it, so this lil wrapper lets that code keep working without any changes at all. it's giving legacy support, it's giving generosity, it's giving "i got you bestie" 😭💖

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

Jeremy Slade <jeremy@jkslade.net> 👑

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• Reaper — the glow-up version, the main character, go check it out 🦋

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✨ POD ERRORS ✨

not me having to tell you this 💀 — the doc above had some coding errors, and here's the breakdown:

Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:

• Around line 53:
  • =back without =over

like, a =back showed up with no =over to match it. it's giving mismatched POD tags, it's giving chaos 🙈 at least it's documented though, we love transparency ✨

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and that's a wrap on reaper(3)! this page is from perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25 — go forth and reap those children responsibly, bestie, ily 🎀💜🌈