As an alternative approach, using die to throw an exception on failure can get you out of this problem.

Now, daemonize doesn't need to return anything. An eval block and test of $@ covers the error case. Any code immediately after the daemonize call is in the success case.

Of course, you can replace the die/eval with one of the exception modules.

Many may argue whether this is a better solution or not, but it would avoid your current problem.