> Two followup questions:
>
> 1) Would truss show this -- or is there a way to test this?
>
> 2) Would you expect the child to survive a kill -9 while hanging?
if the process is in a state where you can't kill -9 or attach with strace
or gdb, etc., i have no idea exactly what triggered that. all i'm saying
is, it's possible that something during Perl cleanup did. then again, the
process may have already been in that state before you ran kill -HUP,
which would make my suggestion worthless. next time, before you kill
-HUP, check the process states with ps or top or something. if a process
is already in this hosed state, maybe you can dig something useful out of
/proc. i don't know of any tools to debug a process you can't kill -9 or
attach to.
