As for the syntax, it would probably help to read the fork manpage for that. Pay particular attention to what the manpage says about the return value, since that's what drives the syntax here.

In general, my $foo = function_call() or die makes a call to function_call and puts the return value of that call into $foo. $foo is then evaluated; if it turns out true, the or die never gets called, and if it turns out false, it does. Same thing, by the way, with open FILE, $filename or die except that one usually wants to keep the return value of a successful fork since that's the ID of the child process.

HTH!

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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