For both questions, I would suggest reviewing perlipc, the perl documentation on inter-process communications. The section on signal handling mentions both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Z (from question 1), while the section "Using open() for IPC" would be a good place to start for question 2.

Hope that helps.

Update: (2011-02-17)

For reference, I believe (after a quick search) that Ctrl-C sends SIGINT (INT), and Ctrl-Z sends SIGTSTP (TSTP).

Update: (2011-02-17)

The example from the section on signal handling can be modified as follows to illustrate handling the INT and TSTP signals:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

sub catch_zap {
    my $signame = shift;
    die "Somebody sent me a SIG$signame";
}                                        

$SIG{INT}  = \&catch_zap;    # best strategy
$SIG{TSTP} = \&catch_zap;    # best strategy

my $t = time;
$t += 30;
while ( time < $t ) {
    print scalar localtime, qq{\n};
    sleep 1;
}
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A modification of the second code example in the section mentioned for question two uses open() to retrieve interface IP information using the ifconfig command:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $interface;

open( CMD, "/sbin/ifconfig |" ) || die "can't fork: $!";
while (<CMD>) {
    if (/^(\S+)/) {
        $interface = $1;
    }
    next if !/(inet\d?)\s+addr:\s?(\S+)/;
    print $interface, q{ }, $1, q{: }, $2, qq{\n};
}
close CMD || die "bad cmd: $! $?";
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