The foregoing suggestions are good ones. I also recommend directing your errors to a separate log using carpout. That way, you don't clutter up your error log too much, and you don't have to grep for the program name (in the case that other programs are writing to the error log at the same time).

If you will be invoking multiple instances of the program at the same time, don't forget to do file locking on the carpout log! There's a recipe in <cite>The Perl Cookbook</cite> about how to do this; in short, you want to use Fcntl qw (:flock); and then use the flock function, which closely resembles flock(2) from the Unix kernels.

TMTOWTDI, but ITYWLTW (I think you will like this way). ;) Cheers.