I think you might want to nix the

$sock->close;
[download]

in your while loop. I don't think you want that call at all, and that it's causing the strange behavior. What it might be doing is signalling to the OS that you're no longer interested in that file descriptor, and then when the child process dies, the descriptor gets cleaned up, and causes the parent process to no longer enter the while loop, thus giving you a very tight, do-nothing loop in the until. That's the only collection of assertions I can make that would seem to describe your script's behavior.

Thanx. I finally got it working with the following code.

use POSIX qw(:sys_wait_h);
use IO::Socket;
use DBI;

$port=7272;

$pid = fork;
exit if $pid;
die "Couldn't fork: $!" unless defined($pid);

POSIX::setsid() or die "Can't start a new session: $!";

$time_to_die=0;

sub signal_handler{
    $time_to_die=1;
}

sub REAPER{
    1 until (-1 == waitpid(-1, WNOHANG));
}

$SIG{INT} = $SIG{TERM} = $SIG{HUP} = \&signal_handler;
$SIG{CHLD} = \&REAPER;

$file="syncd.log";
open(LOG, ">>$file");
print LOG "Program Started : ".localtime()."\n";
until ($time_to_die){
    ### Debug statement (uncomment to debug to log file)
    #print LOG "Until Loop\n";
    $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(LocalPort => $port, 
                                  Type => SOCK_STREAM,
                                  Reuse => 1,
                                  Listen => 25,
                                  Timeout => 120) or die "Couldn't be 
+a tcp server on port $port : $@\n";
    while($new_sock = $sock->accept()) {
        ### Debug statements (uncomment to debug to log file)
        #print LOG "While Loop\n";
        #print LOG "Inside While new_sock Status: ".$new_sock."\n";
        next if $child = fork;
        die "child fork: $!" unless defined $child;
        $sock->close;
        login($new_sock);
        exit 0;
    }
    close($sock);
    ### Debug statement (uncomment to debug to log file)
    #print LOG "Outside While new_sock Status: ".$new_sock."\n";
    if($new_sock!=$sock->accept()){
        report_crash();
        respawn_syncd();
        print LOG "Socket is Undefined Program Crashed to prevent infi
+nite loop!\n";
        $time_to_die=1;
    }
}
close(LOG);
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Again thanx for the help. If you think I should have done it some other way let me know and I re-evaluate my code. I would hate to have a badly coded program because they only cause headaches later.