bash: start multiple chained commands in background

Question

I\'m trying to run some commands in paralel, in background, using bash. Here\'s what I\'m trying to do:

forloop {
  //this part is actually written in perl
          


        

Answer 1

I don't know why nobody replied with the proper solution:

my @children;
for (...) {
    ...
    my $child = fork;
    exec "touch .file1.lock; cp bigfile1 /destination; rm .file1.lock;" if $child == 0;
    push @children, $child;
}
# and if you want to wait for them to finish,
waitpid($_) for @children;

This causes Perl to spawn children to run each command, and allows you to wait for all the children to complete before proceeding.

By the way,

print `some command`

and

system "some command"

output the same contents to stdout, but the first has a higher overhead, as Perl has to capture all of "some command"'s output