Thanks. I still don't get it. I'm having a more profound problem than just not understanding the idiom. I don't understand the ubiquitous expressions I read over and over again in the documentation and in PerlMonks tutorials and posts:  "…in the parent process…", "…in the child process…", etc. These make no sense to me. And running the example scripts and observing their behavior isn't helping, but instead making it worse because the behavior is utterly counterintuitive to me. The particular example code I'm running from the module's perldoc page has sleep()s in it that I know the code is reaching, but are never actually happening. There's never a pause in the execution of the program. It blows right past the sleep()s.