in reply to Help with multiple forks
To avoid race conditions I'd suggest to delegate the starting of the two postprocessing children to the child itself, i.e. make them grandchildren. Fork off the function that writes the file, and as the last step fork again twice to produce the two children that will consume the output.
This would also facilitate things if you wanted to eliminate the temporary files. If it's possible to stream data to the two grandchildren, you could just "open my $kid, '|-"" a pipe to them and write to that instead of the file that you're going to read again later.
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