Thanks to the most appreciated help from a few of you, I've finally solved my pre-forking server problem. Here's what I did.

# just a snippit

my $kidpid;
die "can't fork: $!\n" unless defined($kidpid = fork());
if ($kidpid) {
    # parent code
    # insert the preforking server in here on port 4321
} else {
    # child code
    my $server = IO::Socket::INET->new(LocalPort=>1234,
                                       Type=>SOCK_STREAM,
                                       Proto=>"tcp",
                                       Reuse=>1,
                                       Listen=>10 )
        or die "making socket: $@\n";

    while(1) {
        my $kclient = $cserver->accept();
        while (defined (my $buf = <$kclient>))  {
            # code for killing goes here
        }
    }
}
[download]

What it does is this: The program forks; the parent process goes on to be the pre-forking server on port 4321 and the child process becomes a server listening to port 1234 for kill requests.

I didn't see this solution immediately myself, so hopefully this post will save another monk from frustration.

-aijin