The child is not running the parent. It is merely telling the web-server what to print to the browser which can then turn around and give the webserver another request that will again execute the parent.

While playing with this I suggest taking CGI out of the picture. That will greatly simplify what is going on and let you understand better what is happening. (Random note, rather than writing a temp file then calling system, try doing an, open (PIPE, "| perl) then writing out your Perl script directly to the pipe.)

Incidentally the idea of polymorphic code has come up before. For instance camel code, and Genetic Programming or breeding Perls. There is more discussion at Code that writes code. And if you wanted to get truly bizarre, look at Lingua::Romana::Perligata.

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