Thanks for your time and sorry if I am getting you confused.
What I basically need is to make 3 system type calls to run 3 seperate c programs at once from a master perl script and then ammalgumate the ouput from the 3. The reason for having concurrent jobs is to trick openmosix into loadbalance the jobs on a cluster. I was under the impression that perl fork would wait to finish the child process as it would with a system call.