I don't have complete chunks of code to pass along, but I did want to mention that I used IO::Socket and IPC::Run with great success to run a similar long-running process. I sent commands from the master down to the slaves over a pseudo-tty, checked for updates from the slaves over another pseudo-tty, ran a couple of processes in parallel, and it all worked great.

And the process tree (ps axf under Linux anyways) looked awesome.