I'm running ActiveState's Perl 5.6.1 build633 and your example runs without errors, but with odd results.

It produces no output and hangs indefinetly, but when I ctrl-C the console it then outputs 'hello'. Seems to be a deadlock situation?

Also, instead of fork'ing an entire copy, is there a way to spawn a thread that is capable of accessing variables in the parent thread?

-Nitrox