Have you looked into POE. Although I have not used it (for anything except little tests) and have only seen a demonstration on it, it looks like a good fit for your problem. You can easily feed you array to several different handlers (that will fork off for you).

The notes on the demo that I saw are at http://tilderoot.com/~tcaine/poe. This should at least give you an idea if you want to use POE

grep

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