Did you tried trapping signal SIGPIPE?
I did not try that, and SIGPIPE can be and indeed is trapped on the second print. From there, I should be able to properly deal with this case. Thanks a lot for this! I am surprised there is no other OOish way to find that out before the actual write, though.

eof might help you to find out whether the filehandle is closed or open
eof ($write) is actually blocking in the write script, so not really of use to me in this instance. It might be because of the way the socket is opened, only for writing, not for reading?

Thanks a lot for you insight.