Hi
As pointed out by BrowserUK in this node Re: Unix Review column, your:

1 while wait > 0;  # avoid zombies
[download]

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
[download]

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