You do quite a lot of work (calling some arbitary external program, writing to the current default handle, and reading STDIN) inside a signal handler. This will surely bite you with any old perl (before 5.7.3), and I won't bet that newer perls will have no problems. Don't put much work into signal handlers, just set a flag and handle it in the main loop -- or just exit() or die() immediately. See also Signals.

Alexander