If you use sockets, and if this is a production machine, be careful!

If the socket stays open for to long at a time it might not be to hard for someone to connect to your socket and feed it whatever they want. Be sure to bind this to loopback only! Named pipes are a more secure way than leaving open sockets around.

Also check out Network Programming with Perl It has some great interprocess communication examples.

"Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!