Call a Sub & not waiting for it's completion

[saintmike2]

I have a script that calls a subroutine called "main" that it just basically a just continuous loop that never terminates.
The porblem is that given the struct of the code below, it will read the first line in the file handle run &quot;main&quot; and then stay in main forever without returning back to the original &quot;while (<FH>)&quot; loop. Does anyone know exactly what can be done so that I can just execute &quot;main&quot; but not wait for it's completion?

BEGIN CODE SNIPPET:

while (<FH>)
{
if ($_ =~ /Value0/)
{
$IPAddy = $';
$IPAddy = /\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d*/;
$IPAddy = $&;
$Ident = &quot;Value0&quot;;
&main($IPAddy);
sleep(5);
}

if ($_ =~ /Value1/)
{
$IPAddy = $';
$IPAddy = /\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d*/;
$IPAddy = $&;
$Ident = &quot;Value1&quot;;
&main($IPAddy);
sleep(5);
}

if ($_ =~ /Value2/)
{
$IPAddy = $';
$IPAddy = /\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d*/;
$Ident = &quot;Value2&quot;;
$IPAddy = $&;
&main($IPAddy);
sleep(5);
}
}

/END CODE SNIPPET

Any Ideas?

Mike

 

[PaulTEG]

What does main do, and why does it have to run endlessly

 

[saintmike2]

The basic premise of the script is to log statistics on several routers. The script takes the IP address of the router and the group the router belongs to from a text file. It hen does a &quot;show interface&quot; on the router at an interval determined by which group it belongs to. For instance, if the router belongs to &quot;Value0&quot; then the script would run &quot;show interface&quot; on the router every 2 minutes. But the script also alerts us if the router generates errors. Thus it must be perpertual in nature.

Mike

 

[PaulTEG]

Look up fork, but you could potentially run quite a few instances doing the same thing

HTH
Paul

Run 3 processes, and as part of their startup, explictly set which group they're in???