I would recommend avoiding fork() in this context it's (IMHO) ugly. The better way to do it would be using IO::Select and asynchronous IO.

In this way you get a program that's pretty straightforward For example:

Edit: Minor rejig to do a blocking accept() if there's no open sockets.

#!/bin/perl 

use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Select;
use IO::Socket;

#initialise our socket
my $listener = IO::Socket::INET -> new( LocalPort => 5001, 
                    Proto => "tcp",
                    Reuse => 1,
                    Listen => 20,
                    Blocking => 0, );
$listener -> autoflush(1);

#create our 'select' groups
my $listen_select = new IO::Select( $listener );
my $sockets = new IO::Select ( );

#A timeout of 0 can be workable, but is inefficient unless 
#you have _lots_ of IO
my $timeout = 1; #seconds;

while ()
{
  if ( $sockets -> count )
  {
    #check for an incoming socket. Could probably merge
    #the two can_read statements.
    if ( $listen_select -> can_read($timeout) )
    {
      my $client;
      my $raddr = accept($client, $listener);
      $sockets -> add ( $client );
      $client -> autoflush(1);
      $timeout = 0; 
      print "Connection accepted from ", print unpack ( "C*", $raddr )
+, "\n";
    }
   
    my @ready = $sockets -> can_read($timeout); 

    #if any socket has pending data, read it and act on it.
    foreach my $handle ( @ready ) 
    {
      my $read_tmp = <$handle>;
      if ( !defined ( $read_tmp ) )
      {
        print "Filehandle closed.\n";
        $sockets -> remove ( $handle );
        $handle -> close;
      }
      else
      {
        #do processing here. 
       
        #imagine doing something good with read_tmp
        print "Got data: $read_tmp\n";
        #and sending something cool to the client
        print $handle "Fwatoom\n";
      }
    }
  } #if count
  else
  {
    #we have no handles in our thingy, so we sit idle waiting for 
    #a connection.

    print "No pending data. Idling for connect()\n";
    my $client;
    my $raddr = accept($client, $listener);
    $sockets -> add ( $client );
    $client -> autoflush(1);
    $timeout = 0;
    print "Connection accepted from ", print unpack ( "C*", $raddr ), 
+"\n";
  }
}
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