Thanks for the information! I really need to avoid using fork though because I'm already using that now, and since it's completely unsupported right now on windows activestate perl, and is crashing on the exit of the forked process, I need a new solution. Win32::Process works well I believe, but I need to start the process shown above, and then talk to it. So let me see if I understand what I should do. I should pick a port number (8000 or up??) and see if its available. Then if so, open a socket on it (socket::inet or just socket??) and then pass that socket number as a command line argument to the new process I'll be starting. Then that new process can just open a socket from it's end to the same port number, and just start listening to that socket as it does now with STDIN? Is that right? What protocol should I use? I just want to send ascii text one line at a time...

Justin Eltoft

"If at all god's gaze upon us falls, its with a mischievous grin, look at him" -- Dave Matthews