If you are spawning processes and aren't waiting (or don't want to wait/watch) for them to complete (either by waitpid or another method) you can use

    $SIG{CHLD}='IGNORE';
[download]

to explicitly ignore SIG_CHLD signals. This will precent zombie processes from being created. (code taken from Perl Cookbook).

Les Howard
www.lesandchris.com
Author of Net::Syslog and Number::Spell