I had a post on threads in 5.8 some time ago (Win32) on using threads to ping lots of servers... I really like using threads, but there are some documented problems with leaking scalars.. perhaps these will be fixed in 6.0 :) Here is the final code that worked there, it might be a useful learning example... looks like you are on the right track:

use threads;
use threads::shared;
use strict;
my $wait = 500; my @up: shared; my $th;
my @childs; my $child;
my @down: shared;

my @list = qw ( www.apple.com www.perl.org 
www.ibm.com www.coke.com www.oracle.com www.hp.com );


foreach(@list){
    push @childs, threads->create("ping","$_");
}
foreach $child (@childs){
    $child->join();
}
print @up;
print @down;

sub ping {
 my $ip = shift;
 my @rv = `ping -n 1 -w $wait $ip`;
 foreach(@rv){ push @up, "$ip up\n" if /\(0% loss\)/;
    push @down, "$ip down\n" if /\(100% loss\)/; }
}
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