I was using the signal approach so as to free up the parent process for other things. The use of waitpid in a loop as I was doing should also catch all 100 children if they die simultaneously (under the announcement of a single signal). The only problem might be with unreliable signals. It's just a preference thing.. I would rather not devote a process solely to the task of keeping track of children. Signals (or I guess a more complex event loop) let me do that while allowing me to work on other things at the same time.

I really don't see it as a pain keeping track of stuff like that. You're using a hash of PID's to keep track of your kids, I was going under the assumption that a count was adequate. TMTOWTDI.