I probably should have done this at the outset, but the full text of the code is available at http://www.wxdu.duke.edu/~jason/request-server.txt, which should clear up how it's supposed to work, I think. I originally posted a snippet of code calling the fuction spawn with an anonymous subroutine defined as the argument to spawn. I know last only does the inner loop, that's why I set $nodie to 0 before I call last. Thanks again!