Hi

I need, or perhaps more accurately, would like, to write some code whereby a parent would spawn off several child processes to work thru' a list of work-items.

fork to the rescue then. But I need to keep spawning off child processes up to a given max number of child processes as each one completes and whilst there are still work items on the list.

So, my question (at last!) - how could/should the parent process keep checking to see if there are less than the maximum number of child processes in action and thus be able to spawn off a new child process?

I have no code to show at this stage, but let us say, I want 5 child processes maximum hammering away at a list that contains 200 task items (I dunno, let's say, copying a specific MySQL table entry to one of several tables based on the value of the CustomerID column) and each task is expected to take a variable number of seconds.

This is more a design question than actual perl code but then, the solution will be perl, so that's my cop-out clause! :-)

I have been musing over the contents of perlipc but nothing there grabs me as being the One True Solution

As ever, any help gratefully received.

Bill