Greetings ewhitt,

Forking is nice, but when I need data back to the parent, I like using threads instead. The communication between source and thread is simple, only once at the end, but it usually does what I need, and it's pretty intuative.

If you need communication before the end of the thread, you can set that up with shared data structures with threads::shared.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;
use IO::File;
use Net::SSH 'sshopen2';
use DBI;

# username@hostname connect strings
my @servers = qw( gryphon@hornet gryphon@kursk gryphon@garfield );

# startup a thread for each server
my @threads = map {
    threads->new(
        sub {
            my ($server) = $_[0];
            my ( $reader, $writer ) = ( IO::File->new(), IO::File->new
+() );

            # ssh to the server and run "ls"
            sshopen2( $server, $reader, $writer, 'ls' ) or die "ssh fa
+iled $!";

            my @rv;
            while ( <$reader> ) {
                chomp();
                push @rv, $_;
            }

            # return the server name and an array ref of filenames
            return $server, \@rv;
        },
        $_,
    );
} (@servers);

# usual DBI stuff
my $dbh = DBI->connect(
    'DBI:mysql:database=DATABASENAME;host=localhost;port=3306',
    'USERNAME', 'PASSWORD', { 'RaiseError' => 1, 'AutoCommit' => 1 },
) or die $DBI::errstr;

my $sth = $dbh->prepare('INSERT INTO results (server, filename) VALUES
+ (?,?)');

# wait for threads to complete; insert data into db
foreach (@threads) {
    my ( $server, $files ) = $_->join();
    $sth->execute( $server, $_ ) foreach ( @{ $files } );
}

$dbh->disconnect();
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