I couldn't help this post. I love Perl beyond words. That said, personally I stay away from using threads with Perl. I have always thought that there were too many caveats and the consequences of failure too severe. For me, fork and exec have always gained me the kinds of control and concurrency that I have looked for when scripting. This is no doubt heretical to some/many but that's how I use the language and I won't be changing. I am just too damn productive when I am not worrying if every level underneath me is thread-safe. I understand, BTW, that there are some other CPAN approaches beyond fork and exec and I have read very nice things about them; I have merely never had cause to investigate.