Yes, looking for the filehandle to close is what I tried first, but it appeared it wasn't ever closing unless I closed it myself.  SO I needed a way to determine when I could safely close it, and this is what I came up with.  I'm sure there must be better ways; I just haven't come up with one that works yet and still allows me to periodically poll it, rather than just waiting on it and blocking until it terminates.  I need to balance "only one player child is allowed to run at a time" vs. "the rest of the app must not block while waiting for the player to exit".

..... yeah, even though i laughed, I am secrectly storing that away as an interesting hack which may be needed someday

Zombie Killer .... Have Keyboard, Will Telecommute

...did you try adding the filehandle to an io:select handler, and test for can_read?.... or see checking a file handle to see if it is open...... but you may have a weird app that requires zombie killing

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku

Now that you mention it, no, I didn't. I'll investigate that and see whether it'll work for me.