Hi monks, I ran into a signal handler issue when writing a client server app. The client forks a process for each server to be queried and reaps the children with this signal handler upon receiving CHLD: 
sub cleanup {
    while ((my $kpid = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)) > 0) {
        delete($kids{$kpid});
        $kidcount--;
    }
}

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This works fine. But lets say out of n children, m are sleeping waiting on network traffic from the server. The parent process sends USR1 signal to each one of those m children every 10 secs of uninterrupted sleep: 
while ( $kidcount > 0) {
  my $secs = sleep 10;
    my $finishCount = $hostsfile->getCount - $kidcount;
  if ($secs == 10) {
        if ($outfile and $errfile) {
            print STDERR "Output is being logged into $outfile\n";
            print STDERR "Errors are being logged into $errfile\n";
        }
        print STDERR "\nFinished $finishCount hosts. following ($kidco
+unt)hosts remaining:\n";
        while ( my ($k, $v) = each %kids) {
                kill "USR1", $k;
                print STDERR "$v\n";
        }
        print STDERR "\n";
  }
}

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The signal handler is as follows: 
sub killMyself {
  if ($waitcount > 6) {
        print STDERR "$serverName ERROR:: The host is hosed\n";
        exit;
  }
  $waitcount++;
}

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So upon 7 USR1 signals, the kid should exit out. This works perfectly fine with perl 5.8.4 running on a 64 bit linux(redhat 4) machine. But on a 32 bit linux(redhat 4) machine with perl 5.8.0 or a solaris 8 machine running the same perl this is what happens: The first time USR1 signal is received, the child executes the handler and everything is good. On the second time, the child just terminates. What am i doing wrong? I hope the code provided above and the explanation is clear. thanks in advance -yogi

In reply to signal handler question by yogi

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