in reply to Forking and running all child processes at the same time

for my $file ( <*.log> ) {  # for example...
  defined( my $pid = fork ) or die "Unable to fork: $!";
  unless ( $pid ) {
    # in child
    # process $file
    exit;
  }
}

1 while wait > 0;  # avoid zombies

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the lowliest monk

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Re^2: Forking and running all child processes at the same time
by jimbojones (Friar) on Jun 06, 2005 at 14:34 UTC
    Hi
    As pointed out by BrowserUK in this node Re: Unix Review column, your:
    1 while wait > 0;  # avoid zombies

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    won't work on windows systems. The windows implementation uses the negative of the thread ID as the pid, so wait returns negative numbers for all children.

    It seems the most cross-platform wait statement is: 
    1 while wait != -1 ;  # avoid zombies

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    since the main thread is ID 1, and the child threads won't have that ID. And it's what wait natively returns when there are no further child processes.

    - j

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