[gerikson]

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

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.

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