1) CTS is a Telephony server that produces about 2gigs of logs files per day. I'm using perl to compress/purge and back up those log files.

2) Your example is right on.

3) Each server has many log files. Each log could take about 20 minutes to backup so each time I start a new one I have to make sure I'm still within the maintenance window.

It took me most of the day to figure out why the program would die after the service started it. Turns out a database connection parameter was not being passed in correctly causing "DBI->connect" to fail, which die's. I didn't have it wrapped in an "eval{}" block to trap it because I didn't know it would die. I thought I could just check "DBI->err" after the call. NOT! Another damn forehead smudge on my screen......

Your idea and your help were excellent. I bow to your wisdom as a lowly scribe should! Thanks again, it's works perfect now.