I am new to the perl fork function, and I am not sure that it does what I am looking for.

I have 2 long running subs. Sub1 I only want to run serially, sub2 I would like to fork off and not wait for a return. Here is psuedocode to illustrate (in my current implementation that has no forking): 
#! /usr/local/bin/perl

use Mod1;
use Mod2;

my @nodes = ("switch1", "switch2", "switch3", "switch4", "switch5");

foreach my $node_name (@nodes) {

   # a 4-10 minute TL1 conversation using Expect
   my $port_hashref = Mod1->sub1($node_name); 

   # a five minute series of SQL queries using DBI
   Mod2->sub2($node_name, $port_hashref);

}

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I do not want to wait for sub2 to finish on a switch name before moving on to sub1 on the next switch name. I do not care about a return value from sub2.

With my limited understanding of fork, I expect it will fork the entire program instead of my sub2 code block and that it won't be easy to pass in my hash ref to sub2 after the fork.

Any ideas on how to do this (with or without fork)?

In reply to Forking sub inside a module by vbruno

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