If the socket closes at the other end (e.g server shuts down), then the while loop will end and the child will exit. So you may want to wrap your socket read loop within another loop that will open the socket e.g

while($some_guaranteed_condition) {
    my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new( ... );
    while($line = <$socket>) {
        ...
    }
    $socket->shutdown(2);
}
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This should loop until the silicon wears out, but you'll probably want to put in some graceful shutdown mechanism within the first loop (and the second loop perhaps?). I'd also check out CPAN for some daemon type modules (e.g Net::Daemon and Net::TCP::Server).
HTH

_________
broquaint