What is the best way to run several commands simultaneously? I have a script that calls many other scripts which load different files into arrays, they run sequentially which takes several minutes, ie:

First of all, are you sure that you will have an advantage parallelizing these tasks? The fact that you write that your other scripts "load different files into arrays" suggests, without further specifications, that these files are local ones, and if so then parallelizing won't buy you much.

Also, usage of single element arrays for interpolating and unchecked opens apart, your code is not much different from a series of do EXPR statements, and although I'm not particularly fond of this technique, it is at least less verbose, so you may want to go that way instead.

One particular problem that I see with your code is that you have these getS1config.pl, getS2config.pl, etc. scripts which bear very similar names: I know that a priori this means nothing and that they could actually be wildly different, but isn't it that by any chance they're very similar instead and could be factored away in some code that you may include in your main script, without the overhead of having to start additional processes, and in particular perl interpreters?

In reply to Re: simultaneous external script execution by blazar
in thread simultaneous external script execution by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.