Is there any reason you'd want to roll your own?

None, actually; Proc::Killfam does just what I was looking for. But there are so many modules on CPAN and so many experts Perl programmers here that I could well have missed a better module for the task that somebody here knew about. That was what I was asking for. But it seems that I already found the right one.

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

Hi, I needed to kill the child processes recursively and went through all the suggestions on this thread and the related. Thanks for everybody's input. While killfam is great, i wanted to see if there was a non module way of doing this(in our environment, i am discouraged to install modules unless its absolutely needed). So i have done it using setpgrp. I just want to share that here. Below is a sample:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use POSIX "WNOHANG";

setpgrp(0, 0);

if(my $pid = fork) {
#parent
        print "RESULT: $pid\n";
        my $kid;
        my $count;
        do {
                $kid = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG);
                sleep 1;
                $count++;
                if ($count > 15) {
                        print "I have waited too long. self destructin
+g\n";
                        my $GID = getpgrp($pid);
                        `kill -9 -$GID`;
                }
        } until $kid == $pid;
} else {
#child
        local $SIG{CHLD} = sub { wait() };
        system("sleep 100");
        exit;
}

print "I am all done\n";
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