I have been messing around with forking for a script I have in mind and I'm having trouble getting the basic flow going correctly. I have been doing a lot of reading on the subject but I guess if you have never worked with forking before it's a bit difficult to grasp.

Anyway, I have 10 tasks I want to do but I only want to do 5 of them at a time. If I have 5 running and 1 finishes, I want it to begin working on the 6th task and so on until all 10 tasks are complete.

Here is some very basic code I have been playing with but as you can see, it isn't complete. Perhaps someone can assist? 
use strict;
# use this array to simulate 10 tasks
my @array = qw(zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten);
my $count=0;
my $num_of_tasks = 5;
for (1..$num_of_tasks) {
  my $pid = fork();
  if ($pid) {
    $count++;
    waitpid($pid,0);
  } elsif ($pid == 0) {
    test();
  } else {
    die "couldn’t fork: $!\n";
  }
}
print "Done\n\n";

sub test {
  # do the work here
  print "text=$array[$count]\n";
  sleep 1;
  exit(0);
}

[download]
Thank you.

In reply to Trouble getting started with fork by Anonymous Monk

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