You may also choose to assign the strings 'IGNORE' or 'DEFAULT' as the handler, in which case Perl will try to discard the signal or do the default thing. On most Unix platforms, the "CHLD" (sometimes also known as "CLD") signal has special behavior with respect to a value of 'IGNORE'. Setting $SIG{CHLD} to 'IGNORE' on such a platform has the effect of not creating zombie processes when the parent process fails to "wait()" on its child processes (i.e. child processes are automatically reaped). Calling "wait()" with $SIG{CHLD} set to 'IGNORE' usually returns "-1" on such platforms.