Another thing you could try to use is a pipe. Try writing a simple gather-script that just spits out the data to the standard output. Then write an independent process-script that does an open "gather-script |" and processes the data. This second one is the one that you execute. That way you've seperated the gathering and processing into two processes but there's no coding of forking or anything, and the buffering is handled by the OS.

-I went outside... and then I came back in!!!!