Thanks for this suggestion.

I redid the code as suggested, but it fails in this format on sys_wait_h. I get a compile error :

use POSIX qw ( WNOHANG setsid EINTR sys_wait_h );
### use POSIX 'sys_wait_h'

":sys_wait_h'" is not exported by the POSIX module
Can't continue after import errors at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-
+thread-multi/POSIX.pm line 19
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./server.pl line 9
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Thanks I appreciate all the pointers. Ian