If you want a Perl process to perform two tasks in parallel, you can use threads or forks, and forks are the recommended way at present as thread support is a bit too flaky. When you fork a process, you're left with a parent and a child process, with each of them designed to perform a task. In order for these two proceses to co-operate once they've been split off, you can open a pipe prior to forking, and that gives you a two way channel using file handles for later communication. If either of the resulting processes needs to contact the other asyncronously, it can use a signal - a subject that we can also cover on our Perl courses.

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More about forks, pipes and signals

Associated topic - Perl - Interprocess Communication

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