Gosh, I remember reading bart's excellent tutorial Mr. Peabody Explains fork() years ago when fork() was relatively new to Perl on Windows. Obviously, I wasn't able to wrap my head around it then, and I continue to struggle with it today. But I'm more determined now than I was then to understand how it works.

At least one light bulb has gone on above my head after reading this and seeing its accompanying graphic in blue and green text:

What fork() does is extrordinary! It takes the existing process and clones it. If you're familiar with Star Trek, this is like a bad transporter accident. An exact copy is made of each process, and each process is almost unaware of the other.

The code is executed instruction-by-instruction until the fork() call is reached. At that point, the process is cloned and now there are two identical processes running the instruction right after the fork().

In fact, they're so identical that only one bit of information distinguishes between them: the return value of fork(). In the child process fork() appears to have returned 0. In the parent process, fork() appears to have returned a non-zero integer. This is how parent and child tell themselves apart.

The important difference here is the explanation that "the code is executed instruction-by-instruction until the fork() is reached." This is the first time I've seen it plainly stated that fork() alters the ordinary sequential execution of statements in a Perl program. This helps me begin to understand what's going on in the mystifying example program I'm studying.

I likened fork() in Perl to job control in the Unix shell, but I'm now realizing they're not the same thing at all. A shell loop that launches commands in the background with & is not the same as a fork() in Perl.

Jim