Test2::Require::Fork - Skip a test file unless the system supports forking

Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org>

Copyright 2018 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/ perl v5.40.1 2025-07-27 Test2::Require::Fork(3perl)

It is fairly common to write tests that need to fork. 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.

Checking if the current system supports forking is not simple. Here is 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.

Chad Granum <exodist@cpan.org>

Test2::Require::Fork - Skip a test file unless the system supports forking

Test2::Require::CanReallyfork Similar to this module, but will skip on any perl that only has fork emulation. Test2::Require::CanThread Skip the test file if the system does not support threads.

The source code repository for Test2-Suite can be found at https://github.com/Test-More/Test2-Suite/.

use Test2::Require::Fork; ... Code that forks ...