It has been several years since i looked at this stuff. First, i recommend you have a look at Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment. It's in C, but the concepts apply to Perl as well. Having said that, back in 2002 i had to write a forking server. This is the reaper code that i came up with: 

use POSIX qw(WNOHANG);

our (%PID);

sub reaper {
    while ((my $kid = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)) > 0 ) {
        warn "Reaped child with PID $kid";
        my $status = $? >> 8;
        $PID{$kid} = $status;
    }
}

[download]
Very simple, simply keep reaping children and store their status in a hash so that the server which did the forking can return the status to the client.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

In reply to Re: Reaping Zombies by jeffa
in thread Reaping Zombies by dsb

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