I believe that waitpid() has a problem in ActiveState's perl port (I'm using v5.6.0). The call accepts a flags argument, but apparently ignores it and [according to someone who independently verified this] just calls WaitForSingleObject(hProcess, INFINITE) rather than checking the flag and allowing a timeout. In addition, POSIX::WNOHANG has not been defined but probably should be (as 1). The overall goal, of course, is to be able to do a waitpid($pid,&POSIX::WNOHANG); and have it work correctly, as it does with non-activestate perl under Linux... -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Brian Clarke Applied MetaComputing LLC -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-