Then I stumbled across tilly's node about "flock feedback". That answered much of the rest of the above questions.

I'm still puzzled by the proliferation of loop code sans the "| LOCK_NB".

And, I'm still killing run-a-muck perl scripts by hand.

So if you can overlook my previous inability to get past paragraph two in the perldoc, maybe someone will have a clue about how to do the clean-up of scripts left dangling by an escaping browser.

Thanks Claude