You need fork or perhaps Parallel::ForkManager. If you go to Super Search and do a search for "fork" in the text you should find a few good examples. Here are some that I answered (I posted the code you want in one so it look at it as a treasure hunt!) One word of warning - spawning too many children too fast can saturate your network so don't write a Denial of Service hack on your own servers! A brief sleep before forking off each child is sound if you need to check a large network. Time::HiRes lets you sleep for a few tens of miliseconds:

my children are driving me crazy
FTP in background
PING taking too long
Forked off!
Parallel::ForkManager vs global variables
Help with waitpid and forking ?
Forked up

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

One word of warning - spawning too many children too fast can saturate your network so don't write a Denial of Service hack on your own servers!

Are you sure? I seriously doubt that a server could fork off processes at a rate fast enough to saturate a decent network, assuming that all each process does is send normal pings once every few seconds.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

As you correctly note with a ping of 512 bits (32 bytes each way) I agree it would seem very unlikely that you could spawn processes fast enough to cause problems (even on a narrow 10Mbps network you expect a good 3Mbps before you get collision problems so you would need to spawn over 6,000 processes in a second if they all made a single ping). However once someone discovers the awesome power of fork() it is necessary to consider the potential problems. For instance if you used the default 4 x 32 byte ping instead of a single ping you only need 1,250 odd processes.... I have some vague recollection of bringing a network to a standstill with an ill considered forking script - admittedly each process was sending more data than a simple ping. Another consideration is how many processes you spawn. You certainly can potentially spawn enough to bring a server to a grinding halt.

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

Yes, you want to look into forking.

perlipc should give you more insight, or you can try something like Parallel::ForkManager (alt.).

    --k.

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Net::Ping;

sub make_ping_iterative (\@) {
    my $count = 0;
    my $arrayref = shift;
    
    my $p = Net::Ping->new("icmp");

    return sub {     
            if ($count  >= @$arrayref){
                # If you want to keep going for infinity,
                # Just uncomment the following line and remove the two
+ that follow
                # $count = 0 
                $p->close();
                return ;
            }
            return ($p->ping($arrayref->[$count], 2), $arrayref->[$cou
+nt++]);
        };

}

my @ips = qw (209.6.x.x 209.6.x.x 209.6.x.x );

my $pinger = make_ping_iterative(@ips);

while ( my ($up,$host) = $pinger->() ){
    print $host, $up ? " is up\n" : " is down\n";
    # Do other stuff here.
}
[download]

usted puede estar interesado en el comando de la fork.
También vea CPAN para los módulos relacionados proceso. Muchos de éstos no trabajan en Windows