See DBI, fork, and clone. (note the use of the clone function there). Other than that I've found conflicting information.

Even though I've found several places that say to set InactiveDestroy in the parent, I've also found several places that say instead to set it in each child, such as this PerlMonks post, as well as the DBI documentation on the option AutoInactiveDestroy.

It does seem safer to disconnect the handle in the parent and reconnect in the children (see e.g. this PerlMonks post). Also there's this post (pretty old) on a MySQL mailing list, which says "In other words, whether a connection can be used in a forked child, will almost definitely vary between database drivers and even versions."

In reply to Re: Sharing a database connection across fork() by Anonymous Monk
in thread Sharing a database connection across fork() by ibm1620

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