categorized question QandAEditors Is there a way to run a sub-routine in a non-linear fashion? For example, I need to ping to 100 ip's to check the connectivity of my entire system. <br><br> (linear method) I currently ping each ip individually "one at a time" and wait for the entire list to complete. This can take a while if I set a 2 second timeout on the ping. <br><br> (non-linear method) What I would rather do is use a subroutine to ping each ip "in the background (in unix: a command followed by a '&')" and then wait until each of the ping subroutines reports back (or an appropriate amount of time) and compile the results. 1833