my @pids = $get_pidof('fork.pl', 1);

##</code><code>##

       wait    Behaves like the wait(2) system call on your system: it waits
               for a child process to terminate and returns the pid of the
               deceased process, or "-1" if there are no child processes.  The
               status is returned in $?.  Note that a return value of "-1"
               could mean that child processes are being automatically reaped,
               as described in perlipc.

##</code><code>##

while (1) {
    my $completed_pid = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG);
    if ($completed_pid == -1) {
        # No more children -- exit loop
        last;
    }
    if ($completed_pid > 0) {
        print "<parent>: $completed_pid is done; $childcnt running\n";
            $childcnt--;
        sleep 1;
    }
}