The documentation for forkperlipc, as pointed out by McA below, has an example of using a hash to store all of the PIDs that have been stared. You may want to study that example.

So, you can think of it this way. A global scalar variable in the parent is like a bucket that can only hold one thing. Every time that you assign to that variable, perl dumps what is currently in the bucket, and puts the new thing into the bucket. Therefore, only the last child PID will be available to your parent process, at least in the way you currently have it implemented.

A hash is like a pegboard, where you can hang many things off from the single hash variable. It differs from the bucket analogy above by storing the pegboard in the variable instead of storing a thing in the variable.

note: not happy with the analogy - best available between my ears at the moment.

--MidLifeXis

In reply to Re^3: Fork() Function by MidLifeXis
in thread Fork() Function by carlriz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.