Hi. What I have is a script that I first started on when I was completely new to perl. It has gotten fairly large, several subroutines and whatnot, centered around the Net::AIM module. At the time, I don't think that I understood the concept of fork(), but it sounded like what I needed to easily have more than one of my scripts running at once. Now it seems like I have a problem...
I have a seperate script to use fork to spawn several instances of the main script, and replace them when they exit. It looks a little like this: 
my $counter;

for ($counter = 1; $counter <= 3; $counter++) {
  $pid = fork();
  if ($pid) {
    $child{$pid} = $counter;
  } else {
    exec "perl main.pl arg1 arg2";
    exit $counter; 
  } 
} 

while ($counter) {
 $doneproc = wait();
 $doneval = $? >> 8;
 $pid = fork();
 if ($pid) {
  $child{$pid} = $counter;
  $counter++;
 } else { 
  exec "perl main.pl arg1 arg2";
  exit $counter;
 } 
}

[download]
Now, this works great. But after doing some reading this morning, I'm wondering if there's a way to get around using the exec line. If possible, I would like to avoid the overhead cost of having several perl.exe instances active. It seems like the way I'm doing things is contradictory to the purpose of fork. Am I wrong? .. or what should I do? The way Net::AIM works, it looks like it's beyond my capabilities to rewrite the script in a way that it can be properly forked... I'm confused, and my brain hurts. Help! Thanks, Berto.

In reply to Yet another fork() w/ win32 (activeperl) question by berto

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