Ugh! there are some leasons that I have learned with perl. The main lesson being: NEVER USE PERL THREADS there, i feel better now. Rather humorously, even the perl threads example in man perlthrtut does not work (it causes segmentation faults, core dumps, and other assorted goodies.) So unless you have an AMAZINGLY good reason to use them, dont. As far as I understand it, there are issues and problems with the implementation, and both the API and implementation are subject to change at completely random intervals. If you really need process level parallelism, may I suggest you spend some time learning fork?