Using bi-directional pipes should work fine. You'll need to be careful to avoid deadlock, but otherwise it should be fairly straight-forward. I just finished a small project which uses Parallel::ForkManager, IO::Pipe and IO::Select to farm out SMTP-sending jobs to a pool of sub-processes. It seems to be working well so far.
-sam
Comment on Re: How to send & receive data to many child processes?
thank you Sam... however I'm confused about how to fork and manage multiple pipes specific to each process... can you find any code to illustrate this to me?