I've been having good results on both *nix and Win32 with this code. It executes well over 200 times whenever it's parent application is run and I have about a dozen Windows Users and about 30 *nix users running it about 20 times per day each. Some of the code there isn't doing anything, however the use of the IO::Select seemed to make a big difference in the problems I had been expiriencing previous to implementing it. I will confess that with the above listed usage I have had 2 reported mysterious hangs, but I can't verify that open3 was the cause of those, and simply running the script again would not reproduce the problem in either case.