actually from your code it seems that the parent process will ALWAYS wait for the child process to exit before going to the next file. Your main while loop forks a child (load_file) and then waits for it to exit (reap_children) before going to the next iteration of the while loop.

Try this instead (untested)

use strict;  # I'm hinting that this should be part of the (error chec
+king you took out)

my @pids;

while (1) {
    # Loop other processing here.
    push(@pids,load_file($this_file));
}

reap_children(@pids);

sub load_file() {
    my $childProcess;

    $childProcess = fork();

    unless($childProcess) {
        # Child process so lets exec the loader.
        exec("loader $this_file");
        exit 0;
    }
    return $childProcess;
}

sub reap_children() {
    foreach(@_) {
        wait($_);
    }
}
[download]

spawn all the children keeping tack of their pids as you spawn them...then just wait in turn for all the children to die at the end.

HTH

Update: I should post before being caffeinated...the waitpid shouldn't block as tye pointed out to me. So, I'm not quite sure where it's going wrong....maybe a solaris issue? I've used the above technique before and not had any problems...

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.