How can one do something like fork/exec in python? That's what I was thinking of when you mentioned "forking off jobs". There are a number of different ways to

How can one do something like fork/exec in python? That's what I was thinking of when you mentioned "forking off jobs". There are a number of different ways to launch an external process from Perl, I think this StackOverflow answer summarizes them quite well: https://stackoverflow.com/a/800105 https://stackoverflow.com/a/800105 I'm an experienced Perl user, but I'm not as familiar with Python. In addition, I'm not really using Perl for sysadmin stuff, so I tend to try to keep stuff "within" Perl. As an example, I'd rather use the File::Find module than use backticks to invoke `find`. This has really nothing to do with functionality - I'm almost always on Linux, and the syntaxes are similarly hairy - it's just that usually you get more powerful functionality using the Perl functionality. (edit rearranged paragraphs)