Ok, I missed this in perlfork:

On some platforms such as Windows where the fork() system call is not available, Perl can be built to emulate fork() at the interpreter level...

This document provides a general overview of the capabilities and limitations of the fork() emulation.

I'm still looking for an answer to, "What happens to the child when the parent terminates on unix systems?"

Based on some of my output, I would say: all children are killed. However, about 1 in ten times the child successfully writes all the data to the file. How is that possible if a child is killed when the parent terminates?

In reply to Re^3: fork(): when parent exits, what happens to child? by 7stud
in thread fork(): when parent exits, what happens to child? by 7stud

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