It sounds like what you really need to do then is just set up a bidirectional pipe, fork, test to see if the process is the child or the parent, then close the side of the pipe that will not be used (writing for parent, reading for child). This is very textbook... so much so i stole it out of network programming with perl.

Sample code follows:

use strict;
pipe (parent, child) or die "Can't open pipe: $!\n");
if (fork == 0) { #Test to see if parent or child
     close parent;
     select child;
     $| =1;
     #do your stuff here output should be written to parent
     exit 0;
}
#If we get here we are the parent process
close child;
print while <parent>; #this is to show the output coming from the chil
+d you should then store this data to your prefernce.

exit 0;
[download]

If the above does not allow smp functionality then use the parallel module again and then open a bidirectional pipe to the main process.

Dave -- Saving the world one node at a time

Just a thought. May or may not be any easier or cleaner. Just something I now think about with child processes now that I *have* to do it to make forked processes work with Perl/Tk. (see this node Re: IPC, trying for have child wait for commands)

Justin Eltoft

"If at all god's gaze upon us falls, its with a mischievous grin, look at him" -- Dave Matthews