I wonder why nobody has mentioned it yet, but there is Schedule::Cron, and a nonforking subclass, Schedule::Cron::Nofork (this one is written by me but planned to be included within Schedule::Cron in the next release as far as I gather).

These modules allow you easy scheduling via a permanently running script, and then either forking or running a command, waiting for it to end.

Some code I have running on my PC (under NT) :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Schedule::Cron::Nofork;
use File::Spec;
use FindBin;
use Logger qw(my.email@my-work.net);

my $cron = Schedule::Cron::Nofork->new( sub {
  my $self = shift;
  warn "$$ Running $_[0]\n";
  system("start \"Cron: $_[0]\" \"$_[0]\"");
});

warn "Starting cron\n";
$cron->add_entry("0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 18 * * 1-5", RUN =
+> File::Spec->catfile( $FindBin::Bin, "transfer-OPICS-Vertex-53.pl" )
+);
$cron->add_entry("0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 18 * * 1-5", RUN =
+> File::Spec->catfile( $FindBin::Bin, "transfer-OPICS-SapBCA-53.pl" )
+);
$cron->add_entry("0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 18 * * 1-5", RUN =
+> File::Spec->catfile( $FindBin::Bin, "transfer-OPICS-SapFi-53.pl" ))
+;
#$cron->add_entry("* * * * 1-5", RUN => File::Spec->catfile( $FindBin:
+:Bin,"test.pl"));

$cron->run();
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I start the scripts via start, because I don't need and don't trust the built-in forking simulation - it's amazing that it works, but for a simple script that dosen't really need the resource sharing features, I avoid it.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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