When I saw this, I knew that I had seen what ballplayers call "a thing of beauty."

while (not defined ($pid = fork())) {
    die "Too many failed fork() attempts: $!\n"
        if ++$attempt > MAX_ATTEMPTS;
    warn "fork() failed: $!\n";
    sleep $FORK_WAIT;
}
[download]

Every artifice that is used here is in its finest form and in proper proportion. And I must know fokat, did your posting originally say that fork() returns -1 on failure? (That is the SVR4 behavior for the system call I believe, and until last week, I had forgotten totally about this as well as the original author of this thread. "Oh," I said, "of course fork can fail! Let's do check for that." While secretly he thinks, Damn, I wonder how much code I should revisit to account for this.)

...All the world looks like -well- all the world, when your hammer is Perl.
---v