If the point is that the parent needs all the data from @resp, you could instead of doing a fork, do a pipe open (using '|-' or '-|' -- I always forget which one is which). Have the child processes write @resp to the pipe; the parent can use a select loop (or use IO::Select) and read from the pipe. Or you could use shared memory to pass the information back. Alternatively, you don't use subprocesses, but threads and share some variables.