I had created an expect script the other day that was to gather some data, the script ran well but at times because of timing issues strange things seemed to happen with the data. So I broke the script apart and then built a launcher script in perl. This script launches or spawns individual expect scripts that are gathering data.

The ability to fork in perl and launch a secondary script is quite useful.

 #! /usr/bin/env perl

 @ip_list = qw(10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.3);

  foreach $ip (@ip_list) {
       my $pid = fork();
      if ($pid) {
     # parent
       push(@childs, $pid);
      } elsif ($pid == 0) {
        # child
        # a command to that is launch into its own shell
        exec "./ssl_vpn_fetch.tcl $ip $passwd $user";
        sleep 5;
        exit(0);
    } else {
      die "couldn.t fork: $!n";
    }
  }
    foreach (@childs) {
    waitpid($_, 0);
    }