I'm afraid that I have to disagree with some others about using a POSIX-style daemon mechanism on Win32. It's pseudo-forks, (almost non existant) signal handling, and (crufty) handle duplication and socket handling are all sufficiently non-POSIX that it will require you to add special cases throughout your code to handle Win32 specific issues.

Better to test $^O and put all your Win32 code into a separate place. It makes the writing/testing/debug/maintanence of both branches of the code easier and cleaner.

It also will allow you to do something more win32-ish, like creating a service (see Win32::Daemon ).

Unless it is just the documentation that is out of date, I'd be wary of Net::Daemon, it talks about using threads and perl 5.005, which means what are now termed 5005threads, which have been deprecated (for good reasons) for a very long time and have now "gone away" in the last 2 or 3 releases.