I can find lots of examples on how to set up child process spawning/forking for a client/server model, but I need to set up child process spawning within a script that's run only once.

The basic process is "for each item in a list, script calls a subroutine with that item as input, and returns the corresponding output". I need to simultaneously execute the subroutine for each item in the list.

Using the "spawn" subroutine on page 351 of Programming Perl, I tried this:

my $output;
foreach my $item (@items) {
  &spawn(sub { $output .= &search($item); });
}
This produces, at best, a looping that I couldn't begin to debug.

I know this has been done before - multi-threaded searches, etc. seem commonplace. Anyone have any code snippets?

In reply to Fork/Spawn by Silas

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