Your question seems confused. Do you want to handle multiple connections in a single process, or do you want to write a forking or pre-forking server like Apache's httpd? All three are varying levels of easy.

Here's a single-process, event-driven way:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

# Note: POE's default event loop uses select().
# See CPAN for more efficient POE::Loop classes.
use POE;
use POE::Component::Server::TCP;

POE::Component::Server::TCP->new(
    Port => 8888,
    ClientConnected => sub {
        print "Client connected.\n";
    },
    ClientInput => sub {
        my ($app, $storage, $input) = @_[KERNEL, HEAP, ARG0];
        print "Got client input: $input\n";
        $storage->{client}->put($input);
        $app->yield("shutdown") if $input eq "quit";
    },
    ClientDisconnected => sub {
        print "Client disconnected.\n";
    },
);

POE::Kernel->run();
[download]

Here's another, adapted from Perl Cookbook recipe 17.11 (Forking Servers):

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use POSIX qw(:sys_wait_h);
use IO::Socket::INET();
use IO::Handle;

sub reaper {
    1 until waitpid(-1, WNOHANG) == -1;
    $SIG{CHLD} = \&reaper;
}

$SIG{CHLD} = \&reaper;

my $server = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Listen    => 5,
    ReuseAddr => 1,
    LocalPort => 8888,
    Proto     => 'tcp'
);

while (1) {
    my $client;
    my $client_addr = accept($client, $server);
    next unless $client_addr;

    # Fork to handle the connection.
    my $pid = fork();

    # Parent should just accept again.
    next if $pid;

    # Handling errors is good.
    die "fork failed: $!" unless defined $pid;

    # Child here.
    close($server);
    $client->autoflush(1);

    print "$$: client connected\n";
    while (<$client>) {
        chomp;
        print "$$: got input: $_\n";
        print $client "$_\n";
        last if /^\s*quit\s*/;
    }
    print "$$: client disconnected\n";
    close $client;
    exit;
}
[download]

Perl Cookbook recipe 17.12 (Pre-Forking Servers) is a couple pages long, so I'm not going to adapt it here. I believe the source is legally available online, and consider this incentive to buy a fine book.