actually from your code it seems that the parent process will ALWAYS wait for the child process to exit before going to the next file. Your main while loop forks a child (load_file) and then waits for it to exit (reap_children) before going to the next iteration of the while loop.

Try this instead (untested)

use strict;  # I'm hinting that this should be part of the (error chec
+king you took out)

my @pids;

while (1) {
    # Loop other processing here.
    push(@pids,load_file($this_file));
}

reap_children(@pids);

sub load_file() {
    my $childProcess;

    $childProcess = fork();

    unless($childProcess) {
        # Child process so lets exec the loader.
        exec("loader $this_file");
        exit 0;
    }
    return $childProcess;
}

sub reap_children() {
    foreach(@_) {
        wait($_);
    }
}
[download]

spawn all the children keeping tack of their pids as you spawn them...then just wait in turn for all the children to die at the end.

HTH

Update: I should post before being caffeinated...the waitpid shouldn't block as tye pointed out to me. So, I'm not quite sure where it's going wrong....maybe a solaris issue? I've used the above technique before and not had any problems...

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"