Yes - in the parent process, I'm reading 5000 records from a source, then forking off a child to reindex each of those 5000 records. The parent forks $max_kids processes, recording the PIDs in a hash, then waits until there are fewer than $max_kids active.

My reaper looks like this:

#===================================
sub _REAPER {
#===================================
    my $params = shift;
    foreach my $pid ( keys %Children ) {
        my $res = waitpid( $pid, WNOHANG );
        if ( $res > 0 ) {
            $Children{$pid} = 0;
            die "Error in child" if $?;
        }
    }
    $SIG{'CHLD'} = \&_REAPER;
}
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Note, in the reaper, I set $Children{$pid} = 0 instead of deleting the key, as that was causing panic: freed scalar errors. I now clean up the %Children hash in the main loop of the parent.

The error I'm seeing is at the stage in the parent when I'm reading the 5,000 records from the source

thanks

Clint