Ack! Why does everybody result to shell voodoo to do this? You can do the job in pure Perl. Seems like I had some fun with this a long time ago.

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;

my $pid1=fork();
unless($pid1) {
  # First child
  my $stdout_file = 'child1_stdout.log';
  my $stderr_file = 'child1_stderr.log';

  local(*STDERR);
  local(*STDOUT);
  open(STDOUT1, '>'.$stdout_file)
    or die $stdout_file . ': ' . $!;
  open(STDERR1, '>'.$stderr_file)
    or die $stderr_file . ': ' . $!;

  open(STDOUT, ">&STDOUT1")
    or die "Couldn't redir stdout: $!";
  open(STDERR, ">&STDERR1")
    or die "Couldn't redir stderr: $!";

  system('cmd1');

  close(STDOUT1);
  close(STDERR1);
  exit();
}

my $pid2=fork();
unless($pid2) {
  # Same thing but call cmd2 instead of cmd1

  exit();
}


# Don't forget to wait for each child
wait();
wait();
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Update: (sigh) Ok, the STDOUT/STDERR redirection won't carry out to the system() call. If you weren't calling an external program, this would work. Using IPC::Open3 is probably the way to go. Using sockets to pass the data back to the parent will probably work better than anything involving the filesystem.

--isotope
http://www.skylab.org/~isotope/