<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">Package Proc::Background Version 1.04

This is the Proc::Background package.  It provides a generic interface
to running background processes.  Through this interface, users can
run background processes on different operating systems without
concerning themselves about the specifics of doing this.  Users of
this package create new Proc::Background objects that provide an
object oriented interface to process management.  The following
methods are provided to users of the Proc::Background package:

	new:        start a new background process.
	alive:      test to see if the process is still alive.
	die:        reliably try to kill the process.
	wait:       wait for the process to exit and return the exit status.
	start_time: return the time that the process started.
	end_time:   return the time when the exit status was retrieved.

A generic function, timed-system, is also included that lets a
background process run for a specified amount of time, and if the
process did not exit, then the process is killed.

This package currently works on both Unix and Win32 platforms.  Users
of this package on Win32 systems needs to install the libwin32-?.??
package by Gurusamy Sarathy (gsar@umich.edu) available from CPAN.
Recent installations of ActiveState Perl already include this module,
so it does not need to be installed.

AVAILABILITY

The latest version of this package is available from a CPAN
archive near you in

    CPAN/authors/id/B/BZ/BZAJAC/

INSTALLATION

In order to use this package you will need Perl version 5.004_04 or
better.

If you are running on a Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and if the Perl
installation does not have the libwin32 package installed, then check
to see if your Perl installation has libwin32 already installed.  You
can do this by running the normal installation procedure.  If libwin32
is not installed, then the first step will fail.  You can get the
latest libwin32-x.x package from CPAN available as
CPAN/authors/id/GSAR/libwin32-x.x.zip or
CPAN/authors/id/GSAR/libwin32-x.x.tar.gz.

Once that is completed, you install Proc::Background as you would
install any perl module library, by running these commands:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install

You can edit the configuration section of Makefile.PL to select which
programs to install in addition to the library itself.  If you don't
want to install any programs (only the library files) and don't want
to mess with the Makefile.PL then pass the '-n' option to Makefile.PL:

    perl Makefile.PL -n

If you want to install a private copy of this package in some other
directory, then you should try to produce the initial Makefile with
something like this command:

    perl Makefile.PL LIB=~/perl

DOCUMENTATION

See the CHANGES file for a list of recent changes.  POD style
documentation is included in all modules and scripts.  These are
normally converted to manual pages end installed as part of the "make
install" process.  You should also be able to use the 'perldoc'
utility to extract documentation from the module files directly.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 1998-2001 Blair Zajac. All rights reserved.  This
package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
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