Not 100% sure I understand the issue here, but taking a stab at this: are you saying the parent is not seeing the output in teh variable after the child exits? That makes sense to me and is as I would expect.

when you fork off a child the values in memory are inherited by the child as a copy with the original values staying with the parent no matter what the child does. Unless of course the parent changes it. It's the nature of forking.