I'm kinda curious why all the work?

perl -e 'system(@ARGS) while 1' your program with args here
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The system function is merely a glorified wrapper around fork and exec anyway, complete with a wait. If you want it to daemonise and ignore signals, just add a few characters:

nohup perl -e 'system(@ARGS) while 1' your program with args here &
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Ok, that's not quite the same as daemonising, but it's often close enough for most purposes.

Now, if the program you're trying to monitor goes and daemonises itself, well, then you have a completely different problem which I don't think anyone has addressed. In that scenario, you probably want to use pgrep (which solves the "grep finding itself" problem for you) in a similar structure to what you have. However, don't use backticks when system will do. Just a bad idea.