Greetings Perl Monks! Using standard Perl on CentOS 5.5. I have an array that I create in main, a list of file names. The array is just a list of items to process. My problem is that after I fork (max of five forks), I try to set the $file variable to the result of shift (@fileArray). It does get the variable, but it's always the first element, which means it's not shifting. Is there something I have to do to make it shift?

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
print "Begin Main\n";
 
## we store the child process in this array
my @childArray;
 
## path to the files go in this array. It could be one or a dozen
## and is determined by another process
our @fileArray = qw(fileone.txt filetwo.txt filethree.txt);
 
## This is the number of forks we will allow
my $forkCeiling = "5";
 
my $pid;
my $fileName;
 
for ( my $forkCount = 1; $forkCount <= $forkCeiling; $forkCount++) {
        $pid = fork();
        if ($pid) {
        
        push(@childArray, $pid);
        } elsif ($pid == 0) {
                
                # call the download subroutine and pass the number of 
+forks, parent pid and array
                print "Sending fork number $forkCount to the \"process
+ files\" subroutine...\n";
                
                my $file = shift(@fileArray);
                
                print "DEBUG: $file \n";              
                
                procFiles($forkCount, $$, $file);
                
                exit 0;
               
                    } else {
                    die "couldnt fork: $!\n";
                   }
 
 
 
}
 
## we will stand by here and wait for each of those pids to complete
## The log entry for each fork will go here.
foreach (@childArray) {
        my $procId = waitpid($_, 0);
        print "LOG:  process number $procId\n";
}
 
print "Main Terminated\n";
 
 
 
sub procFiles {
 
 
   ## simulate delay in processing dissimilar files 
   srand();
   my $minDelay = 1;
   my $maxDelay = 2;
   my $timeDelay = int(rand($maxDelay)) + $minDelay;
   
   ## get the fork number, process id and filename 
   my $forkCount = $_[0];
   my $procId = $_[1];
   my $fileName = $_[2];
  
   
   ## get the process id for this fork
   my $processIDnum = shift;
       
   ## sleep $num;
   print "Completed child process ($procId), fork number $forkCount, f
+ile name $fileName\n";
       
   ## retun the process id, which will be picked up
   return $processIDnum;
}
[download]

I can get the first element of the array, but the shift appears to have no affect at all. All five forks have the same filename, so I suppose I've done something wrong here. Everything works aside from the file name, which does not change from How can I remove that element from the array once I have assinged the value to my $file variable? I can't get either of these two to work:

my $file = shift @fileArray;
my $file = shift(@fileArray);
[download]

Thanks to everyone for the help! -AK

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