Why do you need eval? Am I missing something?

I guess that I don't. I more-or-less took that code directly from the Tk chatterbox client without really reading up on fork, and noticing the Camel's examples using  if ($pid == fork) ... Bad programmer! No pr0n for you! Ah, well, code and learn, or some junk. Thanks for the replies, all.

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There are 10 kinds of people -- those that understand binary, and those that don't.