When you fork a process, then parent and child are initially more or less exact copies, including the values of variables, except for the return code of fork(). But the key word there is copies. Those two processes are now independent and variables, "global" or not, are not connected in any way.

That's fortunate, as for Unix-like operating systems, and probably others, all processes are ultimately children (or children of children etc.) of one startup process. If data were always shared between parent and child, all processes would have some common state.

As to how you can solve your problem, the best approach depends on the details of what you are doing. You could share data, for example, through disc files, or by various IPC mechanisms, e.g. sockets, pipes. See perlipc.