This is what is happening:

• Perl forks itself. The main program then wait()'s for the child to finish.
• The child gets a copy of everything that is in the parents environment (actually, it shares the memory using copy-on-write, but thats more detail than we need right now).
• When the child goes away, everything that was in the child's copy is destroyed.
• When the parent resumes operation, it has the same environment as before it forked since nothing ever actually changed it's copy.

If you need to have a second process alter the memory or environment of another process, you need to look into programming with threads or shared memory. Your other alternative would be inter-process communication.

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