"Yet another" mental block? Yes, indeed. ☹

As evidence of my earnestness and seriousness, here's a demo Perl script my friend wrote and shared with me last weekend. I refactored it into subroutines as an exercise to help me understand how forking works, which I sort of thought I did until I started toying with Parallel::ForkManager afterwards. Please rip the script to shreds if you think it will help me learn.

Thank you for the references to the helpful resources.

Jim

Please rip the script to shreds

This subroutine is pointless.

You are invoking an external program via system in order to sleep, but you are adding a first argument of 1 to that call to system, which means the external program is run asynchronously and the subroutine returns immediately:

sub take_nap {
    my $nap_duration = int rand $MAXIMUM_NAP_TIME;

    return system 1, "sleep $nap_duration";
}
[download]

Why, when you want to create a delay, are you calling it asynchronously?

But, more to the point, why are you calling an external program in order to sleep, when perl has a built-in sleep?

(You are aware that using fork on Windows means you're actually not forking a process but spawning a thread don't you?)

---

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Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.