You might find perlipc helpful as well. Specfically the TCP client, which ould allow you to forgo the use of netcat.

--
perl -pe "s/\b;([mnst])/'\1/mg"

Thanks this is good information. Unfortunately, the programs are on two servers across a network so IPC won't work. Also, the problem is not a normal death. It is when a kill comes from the outside. Is there a way to capture all signals? If so, then I could explicitly kill the netcat process, otherwise I'm still toast. What I was really hoping for was a way to call a process from PERL that forces the child process to die if PERL, the parent process, dies. Thanks, Daniel

try some searches...

signal catching
signals
signal handler
killing children

You should also read perlipc regardless of what you may think it's about, or why belg4mit recommend it. (it's all about signals, and pipes, and open, and child processes, and all sorts of other goodies that relate to your question.)

Again I recommend reading perlipc, as hossman has seconded. The other things he also suggests are good places to start.

As for capturing all signals you might look at sigtrap. Or you could do the following:

$SIG{$_} = \&handler for keys %SIG;
[download]

Note that will also call handler when you die or warn.

--
perl -pe "s/\b;([mnst])/'\1/mg"

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $host = 'pdp11.mydomain.net';

my $port = 6740;

my $socket = new IO::Socket::INET(PeerAddr => $host,
                                  PeerPort => $port,
                                  Proto    => 'tcp');
die "cannot open socket" unless ($socket);

#send a custom command to the PDP-11 server

my $cmd = "GIMME\n";
print $socket $cmd;

# print the server's response to the gimme request

while (<$socket>) {
    print;
}
close $socket;
[download]

The reason I suggest this type of approach is that using netcat is going to limit portability for your code, if you decide to try and run it on a platform that doesn't have netcat for instance.

Also, using spawned external child processes will likely lead to more issues such as the one you're having. It's probably a better idea to use the functionality that's already built in to Perl.