Thanks this is good information. Unfortunately, the programs are on two servers across a network so IPC won't work. Also, the problem is not a normal death. It is when a kill comes from the outside. Is there a way to capture all signals? If so, then I could explicitly kill the netcat process, otherwise I'm still toast. What I was really hoping for was a way to call a process from PERL that forces the child process to die if PERL, the parent process, dies.
Thanks,
Daniel
You should also read perlipc regardless of what you
may think it's about, or why belg4mit recommend it.
(it's all about signals, and pipes, and open, and
child processes, and all sorts of other goodies that relate
to your question.)