FORK
fork

Does a fork(2) system call. Returns the child pid to the parent process and 0 to the child process, or undef if the fork is unsuccessful. Note: unflushed buffers remain unflushed in both processes, which means you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the autoflush() FileHandle method to avoid duplicate output.

If you fork() without ever waiting on your children, you will accumulate zombies:

$SIG{'CHLD'} = sub { wait };

There's also the double-fork trick (error checking on fork() returns omitted);

unless ($pid = fork) { unless (fork) { exec "what you really wanna do"; die "no exec"; # ... or ... some_perl_code_here; exit 0; } exit 0; } waitpid($pid,0);

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