....snip......
 # pipe1 - bidirectional communication using two pipe pairs
           #         designed for the socketpair-challenged

...snip.......

 But you don't actually have to make two pipe calls.  If you have the 
+socketpair() system call, it will do this all for you.
 #!/usr/bin/perl -w
 # pipe2 - bidirectional communication using socketpair
 #   "the best ones always go both ways"
[download]

So you are not creating a pipe with socketpair, that is why I brought it up in my original post, about you relating a SIG{PIPE} to the socketpair. I was thinking that somewhere in your program, you had a pipe ( liked a piped open ) which prints to the socket.

It really would be good if you could show a snippet of code which gives your error. Does the code in perlipc (pipe2), showing how to use a socketpair, work OK for you? It works OK for me. How does your code differ from it?

Here is my code:

    my $child = my $parent = my $pid = undef;

    # Create a socket pair from IPC (both ways)
    if (!socketpair($child, $parent, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC))
+ {
        die "socketpair failed: ".$!;
    }
    else {
        # Flush messages immediately
        $child->autoflush(1);
        $parent->autoflush(1);

        if (!defined($pid = fork())) {
            die "Fork failed: ".$!;
        }
        elsif ($pid == 0) {
            close($child);

            # Here the process will carry out the work, and also write
+ to the 'pipe'
            # It will only exit this loop upon SIGTERM

            # Close the pipe with the parent
            close($parent);
            exit 0;
        }
        else {
            close($parent);
        }
    }
[download]

The pipe signal only occurs after a long period of inactivity on the client side, not on the server side (which also uses the 'pipe' to send messages to the client)