What happens when you press Control-C is that all programs running in the foreground in your current terminal (or virtual terminal) get the signal SIGINT sent. And if you read the perldoc on system(), it says... <QUOTE>Because "system" and backticks block "SIGINT" and "SIGQUIT", killing the program they're running doesn't actually interrupt your program. </QUOTE> So what jpeg said is right. Maybe some part of your shell script is blocking the SIGINT. Perhaps you are using over-riding the general behavious of SIGINT to do something else?