I want to give my program the ability to fork off a child at will. So I have a sub that forks when you call it. but it seems that, unlike when I use the standard child then parent in an if/else statement, when the parent in the code dies the kids do not go with it. I can write a clean up routine (will do that either way I imagine), but would like to understand why this is the case or if I'm doing something grossly wrong and it's a result of that =) code for those who havn't stopped reading this yet (this is still just a prototype): 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

print 'do it? ';
my $input = 
;

print 'doing it, sir', "\n";

forkin();

# make sure child is running and healthy
system('ps -ef | grep fork');

# make sure parent can still function
print 'if you see this all is well', "\n\n";

exit;

sub forkin {
    my $child;
    die "Can't fork: $!" unless defined ($child = fork());
        if ($child == 0) {
            # i'm the child!
            &dummy();
            exit;
        }
}

sub dummy {
    # when i had only one op here, child went defunct right 
    # after it completed sub hence the loop.  I've used loops 
    # like this before in kids and they still have always 
    # dies with the parent...
    while (1) {
        print 'I am the child', "\n";
        sleep 3;
    }
}

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"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche

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In reply to forking through a subroutine by jptxs

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