All -- I am stuck on a perl script that does a forking queue. (I am trying to kick off 10 AIX system backups at the same time). My script will also monitor if one of the backups runs too long and kill that process. This is when my problem occurs, if I killed off the forked process (see below my hash #child_output), I don't get any output, because the ssh has not finished. If the process does complete normally, I get the output that I expected. I am not sure if there is a way around my problem, given how I wrote my code, but I thought I might see if someone else has any insight... 
sub fork_backup
{
    my $lpar = shift;
    if ( ( scalar keys %children ) < $max_children )
    {
        my $pid = fork;
        if ( $pid )
        {
            #   this is parent process
            $children{$pid} = $lpar;
             print "Child Backup [$pid][".$children{$pid}."] started a
+t ".localtime()."\n";
            $processing_time{$pid} = time();
        }
        else
        {
            if ( not defined $pid )
            {
                die "\n\nWoah: Failed to fork a child!\n";
            }
            #   this is child process
            #  This is where the meat goes!
            my $backup_command;
            if ( ($lpar_oslevel{$lpar}) eq "5.3")
              { $backup_command = "ls -al /;sleep 20"; }  #Put the rea
+l sysback command in here later (for 5.3)
            else
              { $backup_command = "ls -al /;sleep 30"; }  #Put the rea
+l sysback command in here later (for all other)
            # Fire off the backup command, whew!
            $child_output{$lpar}=`ssh -q $lpar "$backup_command"`;
            #   exit child process
            exit 0;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        #   too much child labor! queue for later under complete_backu
+p
        unshift(@queue,$lpar);
    }
}

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In reply to Forking Problem by smithgw

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