I don't know if this is useful or not but I've just recentley finished a bit of code that contains both the parent and a bunch of children. I use Parallel::ForkManager to fork off my children & IPC::Shareable for interprocess communication. All in all I end up doing 50 simultaneous requets to a web server for different docs, parse the docs and push the results into an array which is shared by all processes. At the end I take my array and email the output. All in all a handy little solution. Let me know if you'd like some example code but most of what I got can be found in the perldoc pages for the above modules.
IPC::Shareable is what I was looking for, many thanks! I phrased my question badly, I was looking for non-network, or non-IP based IPC method. I should have specified that I didn't want to build an IP listener.