I'm trying to write a script that'll daemonize and allow no more than 6 children to fork but also keep 6 children running while there's work to be done. I'm processing some large data files that get inserted into a db and I've found that six is the max number I can comfortably process at once (I'm continually receiving them around 400/day), eventhough there maybe 20 or more in queue to process. Basically here's the code I have. As is I end up with zombies, but if I use a reaper function I end up getting a -1 back from wait. Any ideas/examples would be greatly appreciated. 
while(1) {

    $processes = 0;

    foreach $compressedFile ( @pdfFiles ) {

        $pdfFile = $compressedFile;

        $pdfFile =~ s/\.Z//;

# - For each pdf file fork a new process upto MAX_PROCESSES.

        if( $my_pid = fork()) {
            $processes++;
            if( $processes >= $MAX_PROCESSES ) {
                $wait = wait();
                print "WAIT => $wait\n" if( $debug );
                print "PID => $my_pid\n" if( $debug );
                if( $wait ) { $processes-- ; }
            } elsif ( !defined $my_pid ) {
                die "Error: Cannot fork process: $!";
            }
        } elsif ( $my_pid == 0 ) {
            &load_file($pdfFile);
            exit 0;
        }

    }

    if( $daemon_mode ) {
        $sleep = $sleepTime;
        print "LOAD_PDF => Sleeping $sleep seconds\n" if( $debug );
        sleep $sleep;
    } else {
        print "LOAD_PDF => Finished!\n" if ($debug);
        exit 0;
    }

}

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In reply to Daemonized with max processes by TeKk9

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