A few things: Services can interact with the command line or the network, not both. Services will fail if they must do both.

Use the srvany.exe to run your perl script as a service.

~Hammy
Ommmmm.....

Services can interact with the command line or the network

I think you mean desktop as opposed to command line.

By default, the service will probably run as LocalSystem - which has the option of accessing the desktop, but can't access the network. If you run it as a domain\workgroup user, it will be able to access the network and it will be able to spawn processes, but they won't be visible to the interactive user.

Finally, I prefer Win32::Daemon to srvany.exe - It's a bit more work, but so much more powerful.

update: No. I don't have shares in Dave Roth!

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Simon Flack ($code or die)
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A service should not need to access the desktop. It can, BTW, throw up a message box for an error and it will be visible to any desktop that's current. There's a special flag in MessageBox for this.

But the service will normally work behind the scenes. Another program, running as a normal program in the current interactive user's account, can interact with the user and communicate with the service. That's the model MS describes.