What is happening is that the ssh master process is killed in the DESTROY method that gets called in every forked process when they exit. The next release of Net::OpenSSH will have code to detect that condition and only kill the master from the same process where it was launched.

Anyway, when forking in perl it is usually a good idea to exit from the child processes using POSIX::_exit($code) that will NOT execute any cleanup code as destructors or END blocks.

Besides that, that is not the right way to use Net::OpenSSH that has built in support for running remote operations asynchronously (search in the docs for async or/and as sflitman has already pointed out, use the spawn method).

Finally, there is also Net::OpenSSH::Parallel: 

use Net::OpenSSH::Parallel;
my $pssh = Net::OpenSSH::Parallel->new;

for my $server (@targets) {
  $pssh->add_host($server);
}

$pssh->push('*', command => @stuff);
$pssh->push('*', command => @more_stuff);
$pssh->run;

# ...

$pssh->push('*', command => @even_more_stuff);
$pssh->run;

[download]

In reply to Re: Net::OpenSSH and fork() by salva
in thread Net::OpenSSH and fork() by scotchie

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