By default, , on a UNIX box, when forking, the open handles are inherited from the father so this is not surprising that STDIN and STDERR are sockets if the father has opened sockets. IIRC a process can "restore" STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR if not detached of the current tty. For a start, try to adpat the following code that reopens the STD* handle:

close STDIN; close STDOUT; close STDERR; # not really necessary
open STDIN, "</dev/tty";
open STDOUT, ">/dev/tty";
open STDERR, ">/dev/tty";
# testing
print "STDOUT\n";
print "STDERR\n";
$_ = <STDIN>;
print $_;
[download]

Really, these are not Perl issues. They are thouroughly covered in Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by Richard Stevens. I really need to reread it from cover to cover.

I would be happy to learn that there is a more portable way to reopen this file handlles.

-- stefp