thanks for hint about config

the message, as David says, is Apache's warning for insecure system (but 
production machine is Debian, not Win98, of course)

> 
> And what is calling exec()?  I thought Roman was using SWISH::API.
> 

yes I was, and when I came back to my machine after two hours, the perl 
processes were still there, I tried to add
debug_options => 'dump'

and tried searching, everything repeated, the sixth independent perl and 
the sixth set of rows in error log, no response from apache

[Thu Jun 02 18:14:35 2005] [warn] exec() may not be safe
[Thu Jun 02 18:14:35 2005] [warn] exec() may not be safe
[Thu Jun 02 18:14:35 2005] [warn] exec() may not be safe
[Thu Jun 02 18:14:35 2005] [warn] exec() may not be safe



I stopped Apache (Ctrl+C) and it took some 2 minutes to stop
error log:
[Thu Jun 02 18:20:54 2005] [error] forcing termination of child #0 
(handle 100)

when I started it again, the log had slightly different text (but also 
four lines)
[Thu Jun 02 18:26:58 2005] [warn] (2)No such file or directory: exec() 
may not be safe

so I believe this is for parent apache, and the others were children 
that never return (called with exec?)

maybe similar problem was described here
http://lists.meer.net/pipermail/analog-help/2001-April/008588.html

I will try to mess with paths as suggested there, but later

roman