Ouch. Those signals are gonna hurt. You have wandered hard into a great example of why you should avoid signals in perl if possible. Basically, you were handling a signal when another signal arrived and went of to handle the second signal. Signals are not re-entrant, which means the first signal was dropped on the floor and escaped into the ether.

How about using the open call which forks a child and attaches the child's STDOUT to a file handle? From there, it is a matter of having the children printing to STDOUT and the parent using select() to check for waiting input.

See perldoc perlipc under the "Safe Pipe Opens" section for the syntax a a discussion of how to use the open() call effectively.

mikfire