I have a little script that is running my computer out of memory, and I was wondering if there might be a way around this problem. I have been thinking about it for the last few days and haven't come up with anything. Someone a few days ago mentioned something called forking. I can guess at what that is, but for some reason I get the feeling that forking isn't well liked, but I may be wrong there.

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw(say);
use List::Util qw(sum max);

use lib 'lib';
use Base::Nifty qw(commify);

say "How many children are in the first generation?";
my $generation = <>;
say "How many generations do you want to generate?";
my $generations = <>;
chomp($generation,$generations);

my %generations = (
  1 => $generation,
);

for (1..$generations) {
  my @generation;
  for (1..$generation) {
    my $children = int(rand(6));
    push @generation, $children;
  }
  $generation = sum(@generation);
  $generations{$_ + 1} = $generation;
  @generation = ();
}

my $max_length_generation = length(commify(max(keys %generations)));
my $max_length_children = length(commify(max(values %generations)));

for (sort {$a <=> $b} keys %generations) {
  printf "%${max_length_generation}s: %${max_length_children}s\n",$_,c
+ommify($generations{$_});
}
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When I run that with 5 initial children and 20 generations, I run out of memory. 5 and 19 doesn't. I have a feeling that my $children = int(rand(6)); is what is killing my memory when the amount of children in a generation is in the billions. By the way, as with all my scripts, this is just a bit of fun, so I am not in any great rush.