Just a few things...

The problem here is that if the script prematurely dies, or the script is cancelled via a user's ^C of the script, there is a huge number of stale shared memory segments that have to be manually cleaned up by ipcrm(8). Not a pretty situation.

Did you try $SIG{CHLD} = 'IGNORE'; ?

Enter END { }. That also didn't do quite as well as I expected.

Right, as each child calls END().

I am looking forward to the responses you get, as I have ran into this trying to build a load testing application that needs to fork off dozens of agents and report back the statistics. I used a table within a database for storing the agents stats, and had the master controller process generate a graph from those statistics. It would be nicer to be able to pass that info back without having to rely on an external database/storage to be setup before hand.

cp
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