What does your signal handler look like? My guess is that you're only waiting for a single child when two or three could have all exited at about the same time.

sub child_handler
{
  1 while -1 != waitpid -1, WNOHANG;
}

[download]

This way, if there are multiple children who have recently died, you'll get them all. Of course, if all you're trying to do is ignore the children's return codes and prevent zombies, just set $SIG{CHLD} to 'IGNORE', and perl will just Do What I(you) Mean.

In reply to Re: $SIG{CHILD} misses on zombies by Tanktalus
in thread $SIG{CHILD} misses on zombies by gmantz

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