Dear Monks,

I'm trying to write a program which will calls a subroutine with a given sourceid.
There can be around 200 sourceids which are nothing but directory names.
The script should initially spawn 4 childs and call the subroutine with a
given sourceid (the sourceid cannot be repeated). Script should create new childs
as and when a child finishes the job and continue until all the 200 sourceids are processed.

Below is the code I've tried. My only question is
Is there anyway of doing the same thing in a simple manner and the most important thing
how do I pass the sourceids(unique) to the subroutine.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $NumChilds = 4;

@sourceids=("aex", "athena", "athens","bidapa","bbic","bony","capctha"
+,"cooldo","italy","paris","xmltech");
my $sourcecount =  scalar(@sourceids)."\n";



# This section spawns the initial 4 children.

for ($counter = 1; $counter <= $NumChilds; $counter++) {

#foreach my $source (@sourceids){

        $pid = fork();

        if ($pid) # parent
        {
        $child{$pid} = $counter;
        print "forked process $counter.\n";
        }

        else # child
        {
        callScan();
        #should be callScan($source);
        exit $counter;
        }
#  }
}


#  spawns additional children .

$diecount = 0;

while ($counter <= $sourcecount)
{
        $doneproc = wait();
        $doneval = $? >> 8;
        $pid = fork();

        if ($pid) # parent
        {
        $child{$pid} = $counter;
        print "child $doneval ($doneproc) exited, forking process $cou
+nter.\n";
        $counter++;
        $diecount++;
        }

        else # child
        {
        callScan();
        #should be callScan($source);
        exit $counter;
        }
}


#  waits for all children to die.

while ($diecount <= $sourcecount)
{
        wait();
        $diecount++;
}

# subroutine.
sub callScan
{
        sleep(2);
        print "callScan with counter = $counter.\n";
}
print "Done.\n";
[download]

Thanks in advance

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