Thanks a lot for your replies.

Sorry, my previous answer was ambiguous: $pid is undefined in the handle_request () method of MyWebServer, but it is correctly set to something like "-1470" in test.pl.

In fact, writing this in test.pl effectively stops the server immediately:

use strict;
use warnings;

use MyWebServer;

my $server = MyWebServer->new(8080);
my $pid    = $server->background();
kill 9, $pid;
[download]

But in order to execute this instruction in response to some HTTP request, (I think) I need to call it from within a handler in MyWebServer.

I find that the following:

kill 9, $$;
[download]

effectively stops the server if it is added anywhere in MyWebServer.pm's "body" (e.g. at the first line), but not if it is added in the handle_request() method.

I've also tried tilly's suggestion to have test.pl write the PID in a file, then have handle_request() read this file. It does succeed at passing the PID, and I do not get the "Can't kill a non-numeric process ID" message anymore, however the call to kill does not stop the server in this case.

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