This will only start up to 63 child processes before system(1, ...) will start failing.

You could either capture the return value of the system(1, ...) call, which is a PID, or more generally just use the sample code from the waitpid() documentation before calling system(1, ...) to reap all zombie processes.

This is necessary because Perl keeps these PIDs together with the PIDs returned by the fork() emulation in a single table that has a limit of 63 entries. This somewhat arbitrary number comes from the WaitForMultipleObjects() Windows API that is used in the implementation of wait().

In reply to Re^6: DBI and fork() on Win32 by jand
in thread DBI and fork() on Win32 by FloydATC

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.