perlquestion clinton Hi all<p> I need to implement a cron daemon which runs jobs such as sending emails, clearing caches, updating search indexes etc.<p> The whole daemony forky thing is foreign to me. I've spent some time looking at [cpan://Proc::Daemon], [cpan://Schedule::Cron], [doc://perlipc] etc, but I'm a bit confused as to where to begin and what is possible/easy.<p> Essentially, what I want to achieve is:<p><blockquote> <code> Dispatcher daemon - allows modules to register with it - when a job is scheduled, calls the job and forks -- job tries to obtain a lock -- if it fails, count++ if count > max --> warn -- if lock obtained -- run job to completion -- appends messages to a log shared by all jobs -- unlock -- exit -- if receives a SIGINT -- stops all forked children -- exits </code></blockquote> The forked process should not share data with the parent process, and each time a job starts, it should start with a fresh slate - this I assume is an 'of course' with fork, but what if there were just SOME data that I would like to be loaded only once and shared with the forked processes, is this possible?<p> The details I can figure out, but some pointers would be appreciated.<p> many thanks