UPDATE: the poster above this was thinking of Proc::Daemon not Proc::Background, please ignore this entire thread unless you want to see our less-than-interesting path to figuring this out...

You can't decide whether there is another instance of yourself already running before Proc::Background::Init is run and still be able to send some text back to the console.

I've always used it for launching processes, not copies of myself (and never Proc::Background inside of a plain fork either), so I have not encountered that problem. For instance, I am doing stuff like launching bzip2 or InstallShield and keeping a Tk app responsive at the same time. Actually, I'm not quite sure how you encountered that particular scenario...

I'm sure POE has good ways to do this sort of thing as well, but this at least has provided a lightweight mechanism for my uses.