Am I on the right track and what kind of fork safety features should I include?

fork itself is not complex... The usual things - check whether fork returned undef and close unused filehandles after fork (e.g. close STDIN; in child if the child doesn't read it). Enabling autoflush on STDOUT is probably a good idea for an IRC bot... Do you have something particular in mind when you say 'safety'? Do the processes need to interact in some way?