I wonder why you are struggling so much with this issue - yet another mental block?

Please take a look at Fork-exec. And perhaps try to build an application based on the template mentioned that does something "useful" and watch/study your process table using ps and/or top.

And imho Network Programming with Perl by Lincoln_Stein has still a nice and gentle introduction to fork, exec, daemonizing a.s.o.

Best regards, Karl

"Yet another" mental block? Yes, indeed. ☹

As evidence of my earnestness and seriousness, here's a demo Perl script my friend wrote and shared with me last weekend. I refactored it into subroutines as an exercise to help me understand how forking works, which I sort of thought I did until I started toying with Parallel::ForkManager afterwards. Please rip the script to shreds if you think it will help me learn.

Read more... (2 kB)

Thank you for the references to the helpful resources.

Jim

Please rip the script to shreds

This subroutine is pointless.

You are invoking an external program via system in order to sleep, but you are adding a first argument of 1 to that call to system, which means the external program is run asynchronously and the subroutine returns immediately:

sub take_nap {
    my $nap_duration = int rand $MAXIMUM_NAP_TIME;

    return system 1, "sleep $nap_duration";
}
[download]

Why, when you want to create a delay, are you calling it asynchronously?

But, more to the point, why are you calling an external program in order to sleep, when perl has a built-in sleep?

(You are aware that using fork on Windows means you're actually not forking a process but spawning a thread don't you?)

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