Thanks for the pointers! They helped a lot. So I've written a little test program to play with the forks and have included it below. Is there any problem with the way I'm keeping track of the max amount of forks to run at a given time? It seems to work fine but was wondering if there's something I'm not aware of or perhaps a better way.

my $max_children = 10; # max number of children 
my $num_children = 0; # number we have now

foreach $item (@items)
{
   if( my $p = fork() ) {

       if ($num_children >= $max_children)
       {
          $dead_child = wait;
          $num_children--;
       }
       $num_children++; # child count
   } else {
       #do some sort of child processing
       last; # We want out of the loop 
   }
}
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Edit: 2001-03-03 by neshura