Note that signals in Perl aren't safe even if you just set a flag. This is being fixed but I'm not sure when it will be released. So I'd avoid the signal handler altogether when using Perl.

You could just have a separate file that you periodically

    seek(STATUS,0,0);
    truncate(STATUS,0);
    print STATUS, status();
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and be sure to include a time stamp in that output (and be sure to turn on autoflush).

Another fun idea is to listen on a socket and occasionally do a non-blocking accept. If the accept succeeds, then you can output status information via the socket so anyone can "telnet" to that port to see how things are going. Our long-running servers have telnet interfaces where you can not only get detailed status information but also change configuration information, reset statistics, etc. Though doing something like that is a bit tricky in Perl since threading support is still experimental.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")