Hi,

I'm writing something similar as well at this moment which
might come in handy.

You can pass a reference to a sub and it's parameters to the
spawnChild sub, which will provide you with it's PID and
a filehandler to the child.

It's all still very basic and nothing fancy, that's because I'm
doing lots of learning and testing right now ... but it works ;-)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

#
# Declaration of Subroutines
#

sub spawnChild(@);

#
# Main
#

my ($pid,$fh)=spawnChild(\&Count,10);
print "$pid\n";

#
# Subroutines
#

sub spawnChild(@)
{
 my $childSub=shift;
 my @Parameters=@_;
 my ($Cnt,$pid)=0;
 do
 {
  $pid=open FH,'-|';
  unless (defined $pid)
  {
   warn "Cannot fork: $!\n";
   die "Could not fork\n" if $Cnt++ > 5;
   sleep 10;
  } 
 } until defined $pid;
 if ($pid)
 {
  #Parent
  return($pid,*{FH});
 }
  else
 {
  #Child;
  &$childSub(@Parameters);
  exit(0);
 }
}

sub Count($)
{
 foreach(1..shift)
 {
  print "$_\n";
  sleep(1);
 }
}
[download]

Bye, Leon