I was just reading over merlyn's article in SysAdmin this month, and one comment he made is very timely in my scripting life at the moment. In his utility he documents in his article, he touches on forking processes off to speed up a script that is hampered by the timeout due to the nature of icmp.

One line in the article really bent my noodle, so I'm asking the monstery to help clear the fog. Near the bottom of the first page of his article, merlyn states:

"Perl needs to fork a shell because we needed that child to have its standard error output redirected."

Are there problems writing to STDERR from with a fork() process? Or is it just that he is counting on the STDERR output being read and handled by the shell? Maybe I am way off base, but its a very appropriate read since I myself am just getting ready to change the log output in one of my scripts from STDOUT to STDERR.

Thanks -c