stop/start causes hang in Perl script

[Felix E. Klee]

Hi,

I'm currently in the process of writing a testing suite for some
scripts.  In one of the tests (not to be run on the production server) I
want to shutdown and restart the server.  However, this does not work
reliably.  The following piece of code sometimes hangs (forever?):

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "1\n";
$out = `/usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news stop 2>&1`;
print "2 $out\n";
$out = `/usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news start 2>&1`;
print "3 $out\n";

Any ideas why this may be happening?

BTW, the following line, when executed in BASH, doesn't cause any
problem:

/usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news stop; /usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news start

Felix

PS: INN 2.4.1 on Slackware 9.1