Thanks this is good information. Unfortunately, the programs are on two servers across a network so IPC won't work. Also, the problem is not a normal death. It is when a kill comes from the outside. Is there a way to capture all signals? If so, then I could explicitly kill the netcat process, otherwise I'm still toast. What I was really hoping for was a way to call a process from PERL that forces the child process to die if PERL, the parent process, dies.
Thanks,
Daniel