Well, assuming you dont kill the parent process, why dont you let the parent process do all the forking ?

It's better if you have only one process doing it, otherwise, two children could decide independently that 3 new process where needed and you would realy have 6 new process (and so on).

If you realy crave for children of parents that want to be children of their grandparent, I don't think there's anything like that in the C api, so there should be neither in Perl's fork.

May the modules from Poe (perl application kernel with event driven threads) and it's modules can give you a hand.

HTH