Thanks Mom!
If I were a dumb person who'd never run any sort of forking before, should I just use fork? I also see forks, perlfork, many modules including the one you listed in your post. It sounds like, based on some of the things I'm reading, that my use case -- firing and forgetting -- will create zombies which I do not want considering it will be part of a long running process.
Also, just to clarify, the pid returned by fork() is the system PID (I'm running RHEL) or a Perl specific PID? If the former I could potentially stash the PIDs and kill them from a whole other process, no?