Are you on *nix or Windows? It's not impossible, but on *nix it will be tricky to have cron start the daemon while connected to a real terminal, as cron just doesn't work the way you'd like. You probably would have to write a wrapper script for starting it under cron and connecting your daemon's I/O to the user's console.

For writing a wrapper, take a look at Net::Server. It handles all the low-level I/O for you, allowing you to write just the high level code.

It has several different ways of operating, so one may be right for your application. It takes care of things like PID files and backgrounding the process.

I recently implemented a simple server using Net::Server and found it had some useful examples. In my case examples/samplechat.pl was handy to examine.

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