Hey thanks for that. I'll have to work my way through your code example sometime shortly, but as per usual there are other fires I have to put out short term.

I had found the potential deadlock while waiting for some responses, but rather than confuse the current issue I decided to let it be. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it :)

The main reason I went with the concept of an object was to be able to instantiate an object that would encapsulate all this potential blocking from a test script. As the test requires approximately 30 different potentially blocking processes of the same type running simultaneously, your OO instincts about limiting the usage of the class to one object were entirely correct. I'm a contractor first and purist second, so I wouldn't have invested the time to learn about Perl Objects on someone elses time (and money) unless the task at hand required it.

Hopefully I've learned as much as you did. Many thanks for the time spent.
Mike.