If I understand you correctly, you're expecting the two print statements to follow one right after another for each child. So you'd like the output to look something like:

D is in position 3, with pid 26031
That's what I said... D is in position 3, with pid 26031
C is in position 2, with pid 26030
That's what I said... C is in position 2, with pid 26030
B is in position 1, with pid 26029
That's what I said... B is in position 1, with pid 26029
A is in position 0, with pid 26028
That's what I said... A is in position 0, with pid 26028
E is in position 4, with pid 26032
That's what I said... E is in position 4, with pid 26032
[download]

Is that right?

It doesn't work that way because the children are running in parallel, so there is no guarantee that a child will get to print its two lines w/o another child printing anything in between. To better illustrate this, try putting a sleep 3; between the two print statements.... I think that might help you grok whats happening.

Two side notes: 1.) You really should use strict and 2.) You don't have to hit enter to get a prompt. Your shell is coming back almost immediately... *before* the children are done printing. Therefore, your prompt is getting mixed in with the output of your script. Try entering a command after your program runs to see what I mean.

-Blake