dear gr8 11, I mostly stole the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# pipe2 - use pipe and fork so child can send to parent
use IO::Handle;
pipe(READER, WRITER);
WRITER->autoflush(1);

if ($pid{vmstat} = fork()){
    print "Parent from vmstat\n";
    close WRITER;
    while (<READER>){
       chomp $_;
       print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: `$_'\n";
    }
} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid{vmstat};
    close READER;
       open IN, "vmstat 5 5|";
       while (<IN>){
          chomp $_;
          print WRITER "Child Pid vmstat $$ is sending this --->$_<---
+\n";
       }
       close WRITER;  # this will happen anyway
       exit;
}
 waitpid($pid{vmstat},0);
 close READER;

pipe(READER, WRITER);
WRITER->autoflush(1);
if ($pid{iostat} = fork()){
    print "Parent from iostat\n";
    close WRITER;
     while (<READER>){
       chomp $_;
       print "Parent Pid $$ just read this: `$_'\n";
    }


} else {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid{iostat};
    close READER;
       open IN, "iostat 5 5|";
       while (<IN>){
          chomp $_;
          print WRITER "Child Pid iostat $$ is sending this --->$_<---
+\n";
       }
       close WRITER;  # this will happen anyway
       exit;
}
 waitpid($pid{iostat},0);
 close READER;
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but I can't see how I would get iostat and vmstat to run in parallel, both writting to WRITER so that the parent process can get the data. How can I spawn several process to run in parallel yet still write their data back to a parent PID? thanks ohhhh so much, me