You'll need to look into pipes or -if you're pumped- IPC::Shareable. It's nice that you're storing the pids but you don't seem to do anything with them yet. If you're afraid of zombies (who isn't eh?) then you should be waitpidding the kiddies while managing them with your kill directive (infanticide really). A quick and easy hack to make sure these kids go down with the parent is to issue SIGHUP which the programs aren't setup to catch and will thus bombshell. In fact, this is automatically issued when you logout.

Wait a sec! Is it just me or is this looking like something that LWP::Parallel is supossed to do?

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