It really feels messy and not clear.

fork is fraught in perl without it really being perl's fault. I had recently endeavored to do some multitasking project that way and became convinced that the implementation is not worth the trade-offs, the first being that it must occur in an eval/die pair. My source looks about like yours, and my results were just about as unsatisfying as well. This is about where I dealt with it first: Re^2: using online translation engines with perl.

Also, should I kill the child process when its done by using exit?

There were a couple posts on that thread that showed how to kill the processes. I used a different way to get done what I needed.

In reply to Re^2: Learning to use fork() by Aldebaran
in thread Learning to use fork() by ovedpo15

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