Here's an extremely simplistic example of how to fork a child process off and have it running alongside the parent... if you want to do something simple and non-vital, you could do it this way...

beware though, there are many problems and pitfalls with forks. (perhaps in a future version of perl, there'll be a spork() function that will eliminate some of the problems with fork() :))

To use this code, just replace the while() loops with whatever function calls you need to make... hope it helps

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $k_pid;


die "Can't fork! ($!)" unless defined ($k_pid = fork());

my $i = 1;
my $n = 1;


  if ($k_pid) {
    #parent code
    while (1==1) {
        $n++;
        print "Parent ($i)($n) \n";
        sleep(1);
    }
    kill("TERM" => $k_pid);
    
  } else {
    #child code
    while (1==1) {
        $i++;
        print "Child: ($i)($n)\n";
        sleep(1);
    }

  }
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