Thanks for those replies. My return values are complicated, being String, integer, octal and boolean (either singly or combined). I was looking at pipes just after I posted, but they don't appear to solve my problem. I'll investigate perlipc (have not done that yet, was not aware of it). Since my returns may be only one line of 'text' or several hundred thousand, depending on the search criteria entered I'm strongly leaning towards write to disk, read from disk as the most efficient way to solve my problem.