What you're doing sounds reasonable for unix, but not necessiarilly for win32. If you don't get this to work... Check out the win32 section of cpan and specifically look at the win32::process module. On a sepereate note, depending on what you are doing with your children processes, consider using a database or irc for your ipc communication layer. I recently tried using the pircd server and the Net::IRC modules as a means of IPC, but I ran into issues when it took too long for me to process a message...

Update: Added strike to text since people after me negated my response.

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Zak
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate - mysql's philosphy