This seems like strange behavior to me. I think what you need to do is call waitpid($child, 0); This should cause the parent process to continue to work. I think this would have been better done with threads, however, but that's just my opinion.

Here's an example of forking that I found on the net:

#!/usr/bin/perl  
use strict; 
use warnings; 
use POSIX ':sys_wait_h';  
 if (fork) {   
   # parent   print "[Parent]\n";   
   until (waitpid(-1, &WNOHANG)) {
     print "waiting...\n";
     sleep 1;
   }
   print "[Parent End]\n";
 }
 else {
   # child
   print "[Child]\n";
   sleep 10;
   my $i = 1;
   print "[Child End]\n";
 }
[download]

I think you're definitely going to need to use the signals.