Hmm. Pile upon pile of... nevermind. ;-)

Anyway, since this is for Windows, with emulated fork, I'll just pass you some thougths:

• fork is emulated using threads... Doesn't that imply that if the parent process quits, that all children will go, too?
• AFAIK there's no such things as zombie processes on Windows. It just doesn't work that way. Thus wait, and waitpid probably are unnecessary.

There used to be a fantastic page explaining how fork is supposed to work and how it is emulated on Windows, in Perl, using a comic strip, in Mr. Peabody Explains fork(). The domain (temporarily?) just vanished, according to Google's cache: "This page will be going away on 1/14/2006. This is a planned outage, and will last approximately 90 days." So here's hoping it still will come back, one day...

Meanwhile, here's what I think that should be a generic solution, even for Unix: instead of just throwing the kids' ids away, just keep track of them yourself: store them in a complex data structure, and keep an eye on them in the REAP routine. I propose using a hash, that's the easiest for lookup. Here's some untested code, adapted from your original:

my %kids;
sub REAP {
    while((my $deceased = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG)) != -1) {
         delete $kids{$deceased};
    }       
    $SIG{CHLD} = \&REAP;
}
$SIG{CHLD} = \&REAP;

while ($new_sock = $sock->accept()) {

    if(my $kid = fork) {
        $kids{$kid} = 1; 
        # parent closes the client since
        # it is not needed
        close $new_sock;
    } else {
        die unless defined $kid;  # if fork failed
        # the kid's work
        # ...
        exit;
    }
}
[download]

To kill them all, just work your way through keys %kids. kill apparently can handle them all without loop.

delete $SIGNAL, keys %kids;
[download]

I don't know what signal you're supposed to be using.

Like I said, I don't expect the REAP routine to ever be triggered on Windows, but I'm not sure. In that case, the %kids hash would only grow over time, but probably not at a huge rate, and thus, would not be a real problem.

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