Why do I have to kill?

[Chris Jack]

I have a perl program running on Unix that does a fork, runs a process in the child, and exits. If I just let it exit(0) - then the Unix process doesn't die. If I do a kill 15, the child process does go away. I've tried running the Perl debugger on it, but it stops when the parent stops. This thing has a zillion libraries so it's hard to know what else might be effecting it. If I run truss on the process it tells me:
lwp_sema_wait(0x000F5630)       (sleeping...)signotifywait()                 (sleeping...)lwp_sema_wait(0xFDB0DE60)       (sleeping...)lwp_cond_wait(0xFF0DCD30, 0xFF0DCD18, 0x00000000) (sleeping...)
Some relevant lines from the program are:
 
$pid = fork();if (not defined $pid) { print "resources not available.\n";} elsif ($pid == 0) { print "IM THE CHILD: $$ " . getppid() . "\n"; sleep(1); system('bcp - rest of cmd omitted, but it works.');
print "CHILD finished\n"; # kill 15, $$; exit(0);}else {print "child  pid is $pid\n";print "parent pid is $$\n";print "IM THE PARENT\n";}
 
 
I get the "CHILD finished" message, but if I need to uncomment the kill to get the child process to die.
 
Any ideas anyone?
 
TIA
Chris
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