Well, I have not had great results with threads in Perl, so that is part of my trepidation. Also, right now the loop calls itself using an ->after() directive, and its not clear to me if the child process could cancel the existing after counter one and immedately call the process. I would hate to go to this effort just to have the parent thread poll on a shared variable rather than a file, I'd like a true 'interrupt' type behaviour. Thanks!