You're not arranging for your child processes to exit; so they takeup where the parent left off.

The first time through the foreach loop, you fork an new process. When that process finishes &VF4($line);, it loops around and passes throguh the fork, doing another fork to run &VF4($line); - which the parent process also did. Hence &VF4($line); runs twice for $fiveprimedir

I think if you exit; after &VF4($line); you get the effect you want. (UNTESTED).

update: missed the second half of your question, about the main process finishing immediately after the forks.

use of fork is:

# UNTESTED
for $line (@whatever)
{
  $pid = fork(); # 0 in child, child's pid in parent
  if ($pid)
  {
    # in parent process
    push @pids, $pid;
  }
  else
  {
    #child processe
    &VF4($line);
    exit;
  }
}
for ( @pids ) { waitpid($_,0) }
# wait for all children
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--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com