Minor nit-pick that probably doesn't answer your immediate problem: "fork()" does not return a negative number; failure is indicated by returning undef. So your initial "if" condition should be:

  if ( ! defined( $g_pid ))
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Apart from that, you seem to be using variables with global scope for flow-control, and you didn't show how/whether these were initialized ($g_stop, $g_timeout). So it's hard to guess whether it's a problem that $g_stop is never assigned a value within the "while(1)" loop. Also, you didn't include whatever code you have (if any) that actually handles the event generated by "alarm()". Could that be relevant?