[Haskell-cafe] createProcess interferes with sockets?

[Evan Laforge]

On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Donn Cave <donn at avvanta.com> wrote:
> Quoth Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com>,
>
>> sleep = Process.createProcess (Process.proc "sleep" ["5"])
>
>  sleep = Process.createProcess
>         ((Process.proc "sleep" ["5"]) {Process.close_fds = True})
>
>
> - Because the client uses buffered I/O (hGetContents in this case, but
> hGet-anything would be the same), it doesn't "see" the server response
> until a) buffer full, or b) end of file (server closes connection.)
>
> - The server does close the connection, but after the "sleep" process
> has forked off with a copy of the connection fd.  If it doesn't close
> that fd explicitly, it holds it open until process exit (5 seconds.)

Oh I see, because the subprocess inherits the socket connection.  That
makes sense, though it's tricky.  Tricky tricky unix.  Why does fork()
have to be so complicated?  Thanks, that fixed my problem.