You are using open and thus the child's output is not being thrown into STDOUT but to a pipe. Closing all pipes without reading the output will not pipe the sub-process output to the parent's parent since they are on different pipes. You should probably use fork to fork(tm) without redirecting output to a different pipe. I managed to confuse myself with that last phrase so here's an idea:

$| = 1;
$pid = open(first_child, "-|");
if ($pid) {
    while(<first_child>) {
        if ($_ =~ m/^Error/) { } #do nothin
        elsif ($_ =~ m/^Hits/) { push (@hits, $_) ; }
        else { push (@line, $_); }
    }
}
else {
    my @cpic;
    foreach $i(0..@gets) {
        $e        = $gets[$i];
        $c        = $searches{$e}{handler};
        $p        = $FORM_DATA{p};
        $q        = $FORM_DATA{q};
        $u        = $searches{$e}{url};
        $caller   = "perl $c $p $q $u";
        $cpid[$i] = fork;
        unless ($cpid[$i]) {
            system ($caller);
            exit;
        }
    }
    exit;
}
[download]

Big warning! Untested code. I don't understand the task that you are trying to accomplish but I (hope) can now see what's wrong. This might not run but should give you an idea.

BTW: Why don't you use ForkManager to accomplish this task ? It simplifies debugging as it makes your code clearer and gives you more control on your child processes.