These things are *very* applicable to "the Internet and CGI". On systems that support them (for forking, usually UN*X or a derivative is required for good behavior), they are incredibly powerful. My hunch is you may not understand what they actually are, as I suspect comprehension of that should answer your question. perlipc has a good and thorough explanation, but it's mostly a how. A good perl book would go a long ways in describing what, but I can try. Pipes are one manner of letting processes communicate. Your CGI programs are probably communicating with the web server over a pipe, but you don't have to know that. That's one of the beautiful things about pipes. The web server is talking with your web browser over a socket, but both of them have to be aware of this and share an agreed-upon language and etiquette. As for children, forking simply creates another process (running instance of the program) that can do work. There's also some extra stuff like the fact that it's quicker than actually running the same program again, efficient(YMMV), and requires a little maintenance. Another way to think of it is in terms of farming. A farm is a lot of work, if you have lots of children you can pawn the work off on them.

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I'm not belgian but I play one on TV.