I'm doing about 30 snmpwalk/snmpget commands in one perl script to find the config on Cisco boxes and throw them into an html page. The problem is, each router/switch takes about 13 minutes to complete because of the amount of time these walks/gets take to complete. Having about 40-50 pieces of Cisco network equipment means that it would take this script about 10 hours to complete (yeah, unexceptable).

I've been reading up on the "system" function, but it looks like it "waits until that process is done" before it moves on to the next command.

I just need a way to multithread this script in a very simple manner -- none of the threads _ever_ have to communicate with each other -- they just should run simultaneously and return what they get.

Any simple ways to do this? Am I misunderstanding the "system" function?


Thanks for any help I can get!
Justin