Problem with Compress::Zlib on OS -X 10.2.3

[Paul Marquess]

Hi Folks,

I'm the author or the Compress::Zlib module. I've had a couple of reports of
my module failing on OS X 10.2.3 that I hope someone on this forum can help
me with.

With the help of one of the bug reporters, I've narrowed the problem down to
a specific are of my test harness. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the
scenario that triggers the failure.

I have a Perl function that can take a file handle as parameter. That
filehandle needs to be passed to the zlib library, but the zlib API expects
a file descriptor, so I pass the fileno to the XSUB, thus:

    sub gzopen

    {

        my $fh = shift ;

        xs_gzopen(fileno($fh));

    }

and then in XS-land

    xs_gzopen(int fd)

    CODE:

            /* make use of fd */

And here's the problem -- once in XSUB-land, any use of "fd" fails
completely! For example if I do an lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_CUR) to find the
current offset, it returns -1 with errno of 0, which isn't particularly
helpful.

This feature has been working for years on all other platforms (icluding
older Mac systems). Anyone know if this is just a "feature" of OS-X, or is
there a way to work around it?

cheers

Paul