But, if you follow tye's advice about "exec", keep in mind that (perldoc -f exec):

Note that `exec' will not call your `END' blocks, nor will it call any `DESTROY' methods in your objects.

To avoid weird surprises for long-running programs, I usually let them end "manually" after a period of time and then start/restart them with an endless loop in a shell or batch script.

/J