The basic premise was that I needed to catch all errors from a series of steps, and if there were any errors in the middle, I needed to do whatever to undo the changes:

   while(1) {
      eval {
         do_this();
         do_that();
         fork_and_stuff();
         and_why_not_do_this_as_well();
      };
      if( $@ ) {
         undo_changes();
         log( "there was, like, something wrong: $@" );
      }
   }
[download]

It just so happened that one of the subs actually forked, and hence the problem. I wasn't trying to eval the fork() per se... ;)