<quote> It sounds as if you need a child to do the parent's blocking tasks. </quote>

Yes, that would have been perferrable. But as I mentioned earlier, it'd need lots of changes to the legacy code, which is not feasible. Also, I want to spawn a process only for very select tasks, as there's a danger of system being overlaoded with too many processes.

<quote> en make an SIG{__DIE__} block that signals the parent PID with a HUP </quote>

That's a good idea. But this won't work when child hits fatal errors like receiving a SIGKILL or SEGV.

PS: New to perlmonks. Not sure how to quote msgs, and too lazy to read up right now ;-)