C:\>perl -e "use POSIX qw(:sys_wait_h SIGHUP SIGKILL); my $child_pid; if(!($child_pid = fork())) { exit(0); } kill(SIGKILL, $child_pid);" Your vendor has not defined POSIX macro SIGHUP, used at -e line 1 #### C:\> perl -v This is perl, v5.8.8 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread (with 50 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail) Binary build 820 [274739] provided by ActiveState