It turns out that this is one of the Things You Can't Do under Win32. Because of how Perl for win32 supports signals and forking (it doesn't, really -- see below) you have to go about it an alternate way. I suggest that you look at the Cookbook's recipe 17.13, "Non-forking servers." I've implemented several servers which had to work under Win32 for various reasons, and found it immensely useful. Unfortunatly, it tends to make the code go everywhere, but there's no easy way around that.

Win32's treating of signals is abysmal. The bottom line is that you might get killed at any second and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. END{} doesn't get called. %SIG is ignored. Because of this, your process must live in constant fear of its life. To top it off, until 5.6, you couldn't even create your own progeny. 5.6's implementation of fork(), though buggy, does work. But because signal handlers still don't work (like, say, SIGCHLD?) it's not much use.

As mentioned above, Win32::Process is the "equivalent" of fork. It's less useful because it's a seperate process entirely, though -- you don't even get a chance to give it your old varables (like, say, sockets..) So it isn't useful for servers..

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perl -e 'print "Proud user of $^X$\"$]!$/";'