Three - is there a better way to go about doing this?
Yes. You are duplicating the functonality of Parallel::ForkManager. All you need is the following:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Parallel::ForkManager ();
use constant $MAX_PROCESSES => 3;
{
my $pm = Parallel::ForkManager->new($MAX_PROCESSES);
foreach my $fw (qw(fw1 fw2 fw3 fw4 fw5)) {
my $pid = $pm->start and next;
exec "remotelogfile $fw logfile > /var/$fw.log"
or die("Unable to launch \"remotelogfile $fw\": $!\n");
# Will never reach this, but that's ok since it only calls exit.
$pm->finish; # Terminates the child process
}
}
or just
use Parallel::ForkManager ();
my $pm = Parallel::ForkManager->new(3);
foreach my $fw (qw(fw1 fw2 fw3 fw4 fw5)) {
$pm->start and next;
exec "remotelogfile $fw logfile > /var/$fw.log";
die("Unable to launch \"remotelogfile $fw\": $!\n");
}