Catching Control-C in perl

  $SIG{INT} = sub { die(" exiting\n"); };

or more generally :

  $SIG{INT} = \&handler;
  sub handler { die(" exiting\n"); }

Remember that if you want to control-c out of a loop that happens to be making repeated calls to system(), you'll want some delay in the loop so that you spend a bit of time in perl and not just in subshells:

    sleep(1);

or, sub second sleeps:

    select(undef, undef, undef, 0.1);

or even:

    use Time::HiRes;
    sleep(0.1);