in reply to Passing a socket to a parent

Yes, you can. It's not portable though, so be aware. It isn't trivial either, and there isn't any specific Perl support for it. Under System V Release 4, you would use a stream pipe and ioctl. On BSD, you would use a Unix Domain Socket.

Details, including example code (in C), are to be found in Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment in the chapter Advanced Interprocess Communication.

Abigail