The process number of the Perl running this script. You should consider this variable read-only, although it will be altered across fork() calls. (Mnemonic: same as shells.)
Note for Linux users: on Linux, the C functions getpid()
and getppid()
return different values from different threads. In order to be portable, this behavior is not reflected by $$
, whose value remains consistent across threads. If you want to call the underlying getpid()
, you may use the CPAN module Linux::Pid
.