Here is the problem. I want to write a progam that forks itself the specified number of times. And each of the forked programs runs another script a specified number of times. Here is what I tried but its not doing what I want, sigh

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
# %W% %G%
# Michael Petnuch, June 26, 2002

use strict;

my %opt;

%opt = get_args();

foreach ( 1 .. $opt{'F'}) {

  my $child;

  if(!defined($child = fork())) {
    die "Cannot fork: $!";
  if(!defined($child = fork())) {
    die "Cannot fork: $!";
  } elsif ($child == 0) {
    fork_it();
  } else {
    sleep(2);
    next;
  }

}

####### SUBS #######
sub fork_it {

  foreach( 1 .. $opt{'P'}) {
    exec("$opt{'E'} > /dev/null  2>&1");
  }

}

sub help {

  my $error = shift;

  print $error, "\n" if(defined($error));
  print STDERR "\n"
        ."Usage: $0 [-f number of childs] [-p number script processess
+]\n"
        ."          [-e what to execute] [-s how long to sleep inbetwe
+en forks]\n\n"
        ."Example: $0 -f 2 -p 2 -e /usr/bin/tty_wrapper.sh -s 2\n\n";

  exit(0);

}

sub get_args {

  my %opt;

  while ($_ = lc shift @ARGV) {
    if(/-f/) {
      $opt{'F'} = shift @ARGV;
    if(/-f/) {
      $opt{'F'} = shift @ARGV;
    }  elsif (/-s/) {
      $opt{'S'} =  shift @ARGV;
    }  elsif (/-p/) {
      $opt{'P'} =  shift @ARGV;
    } elsif (/-e/) {
      $opt{'E'} = shift @ARGV;
    } elsif (/(-|--)(h$|help$)/) {
      help();
    } else {
      help("Invalid parameter $_");
    }
  }

  return %opt;

}
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