Yeah, I'm aware of IPC::Shareable. Since I'd like to be able to develop this under Win32 (which seems to like the IPC::Semaphore that Shareable depends on) I'd probably end up using a different module with the similar abilities (any recommendations there?). Mainly, modules like that are somewhat low level, and I was hoping I could be lazy and use a module that takes care of issues like locking and memory allocation.