Good point. I certainly should have checked the return values. There is a large potential bug lying in wait there.

I don't think this would ever fill up the proc table though, The loop is bound by a for (1..4) which means that in the wost case, we would have:

1 parent  through the first time     (creates 1 child)
1 parent  1 child the second time    (creates 2 children)
2 parents 2 children the third time  (creates 4 children)
4 parents 4 children the fourth time (creates 8 children)
[download]

So at most I see a possible 16 procs being active at once.... of course they might never exit due to the messed up @pids array, but thats another matter.

Again, thanks for the catch.

-Blake