And to argue the other way (somewhat), for a grainyness of one minute you well may be better off with a persistent program. How much startup overhead there is to your program sould influence your decision. If it's a 100 line program that just diddles a logfile or three, you'll probably be better off running from cron. If it's a 10's-of-thousand line monster that has to do 45 seconds of initialization before it runs and generates gobs of network traffic at startup, consider a persistent daemon.

If you do make it persistent, consider POE which will give you an easy way to setup getting poked at the right interval (c.f. POE::Kernel's delay_add method).