When a program forks the fork returns the pid of the child so the parent can use this to kill it at will.

my $pid = fork();
if ( $pid == 0 ) {
    # child process so do stuff here
    # usually have an exit to ensure child 
    # does not escape this if clause
  exit;
}
else {
    # parent process, waits a while
    sleep 60
    # kills child
    kill 9, $pid;
}

# parent continues on here (as will child if not killed or exited)
[download]

You seem somewhat confused about forking. The parent is the whole program. It spawns children and continues. The child is a whole copy of the program and gets copies of all the data/handles to that point.

There is a vast quantity of discussion about fork on PM - you can find it using Super Search

cheers

tachyon

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If you want to kill off children after a certain time, simply make use of the child PID returned by fork:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @child;
for (0..5) {
  print "Spawning child $_\n";
  $child[$_]=spawn(sub {while (1) {}});
}
sleep 5;
for (0..5) {
  print "Killing child $_\n";
  kill 15, $child[$_];
}
sub spawn {
  my $code=shift;
  #die "Something fishy - could not fork\n" if ((my $pid = fork())== -
+1);
  # Oops - wrong fork() semantics
  die "Something fishy - could not fork\n" unless (defined(my $pid=for
+k()));
return $pid if ($pid);
  exit &$code;
}
[download]

Update: I was stuck in C - see comments in code :)

CU
Robartes-

Assuming you have only forked once, there is no way to keep the program running while killing both the parent and the child process. In fact, I am not really sure what you mean exactly when you refer to "the whole program itself"; the program, when running, consists merely of the parent process and its children (with associated data etc. of course)

Maybe you could post a clarification to explain what exactly you want to do? Also, posting your program (or part of it) might help, if that's possible.

--
mowgli