Yes, I did pre-investigate perlipc docs, but apart from much being over (or in this case 'under') my head there, I got the impression of it being incorrectly targeted to my purposes of 'higher-level' user-console-interactivity .. ie that most ipc functionality targets 'lower-level' background detection and signal-handling. For instance, I didn't think it enabled me to spawn child processes that escaped the stdout-less environment assigned to cron? However, please correct me if I am wrong there. (My reply above to aquarium may clarify this a bit).

I will take a look at apachectl. Thanks for the tip.