Ah, ok. Well, Perl cannot do that. ;-)

The magic in this is basically an Operating System feature, only found on *nixen, which is accessible with the C-function by the same name. Check out man fork.

So, Perl doesn't almost doesn't do anything to fork itself, it just calls the C-function "fork()" and let's the Operating System do all of the work.

Well, close. Since 5.6.0, Perl flushes all files opened for output before forking. And on Win32 systems, there is no such thing as a C-function fork(). There some magic is done by Perl, but since I don't know much about Win32 systems, I can't tell you anything about that.

Hope this clears it up.

Liz