I cannot find a single correct statement in your post, even after careful testing of each point you make ... For example, if ($child) will likely be undef, so what?

At a minimum, the statement "upon failure to fork you'll get undef" is certainly correct, and fork certainly can fail. In your updated code you're still not checking for the definedness of $child. See also the various fork examples in perlfork and perlipc.

In reply to Re^4: Doing every X seconds by haukex
in thread Doing every X seconds by dideod.yang

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