If your parent is just chillin' while the kiddies are out havin' fun, try using the signal killer in the parent, instead (it ain't got no nothin' betta ta doo!) Signals are still faulty in perl, but a process kill is a better process kill when you're not signaling yourself. sleep(120) in the parent while the kiddies are movin', after the wakeup, send a kill (or even better a sigqueue which no one uses!) to finish off those kiddies! Only one fatal signal involved which will best interrupt the kiddies at play- hurrah. If both the kiddie and the papa are executin', you can always write a short script to be their parents! (or pipe the PID to the "grandparent" and tell it to kill it after 2 minutes.) There's gotta be a UNIX command for that- if I could only remember...