Okay, this may be difficult to follow along to; but I will do my best.

When you fork, your children processes get an exact replica of the process. So, your first child gets spawned. Now, it has a copy of $i which has the value zero. So, it is spawned, it runs the phork() subroutine, and it returns to the for loop with a $i of 0. So, it beings to execute the loop; and your first child process forks its own child and that child (the first child of the first child of the parent) is spawned and it gets a copy of the memory block who has a $i of 1. This stuff happens some more with the second child of the parent and so on. What you want is something along these lines: (warning: untested) 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $childLimit = shift @ARGV; #get total number of children
my @pids = (); #array of pids of children

for(my $i = 0; $i < $childLimit; $i++)
{
    if( !( $pids[$i] = fork() ) )
    {
        # in the child
        callChildSub();

        exit(0); # exit from the child process IMPORTANT
    } 
}

foreach my $pid (@pids)
{
    waitpid $pid, 0;
}

sub callChildSub()
{
    print "I am the child with pid $$.\n";
}

[download]
Of course, that needs some error-checking and such, but that should get you started.

Jeremy

In reply to Re: Re: Re: A Quick fork theory question by enoch
in thread A Quick fork theory question by E-Bitch

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