I recently switched to Perl because of Java's terrible lack of any text parsing ability beyond the StringTokenizer class, and curiousity, enthusiasm, and excitement are making me a true convert. As a long time exclusive Java programmer, however, I don't have any experience with system-dependent functions. I have seen fork() used in several contexts on PM and though I can see and appreciate its power and usefulness, I cannot think of anywhere I would be able to use it in practical, non-network code. Could some kind monks give me several examples where the use of fork() would be practical and efficient?