Yes, I meant that Thread::Pool works as is if you don't try to run it under the perl debugger. In that case the test script works with minor modificaitons. The following is a simpler example that worked for me as is:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Thread::Pool;

my $pool = Thread::Pool->new({workers => 10,
                              do      => \&do,
                              monitor => \&monitor});

my @jobs = ('A' .. 'Z');

my $count;
for (@jobs) {
    print $count++, "\n";
    $pool->job($_);
}

sub do {
    my $letter = shift;
    print "begin: $letter\n";
    for (1 .. 10000000) {
        my $x = $_ ^ 2;
    }
    print "end: $letter\n";
    return "$letter is back\n\n";
}

sub monitor {print shift}
[download]

Fire is up and watch those processors hummmm! Also the lighter weight version offered by browserUK in this thread worked well for me as posted. Thanks to you all. Barry