Unfortunately, the child process could be everything: a perl script, a shell script, a binary executable, a rocket... :-), so your approach is not suitable.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestion.

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz