I use fork in all my daemons. It looks pretty much the same in every one... (you will find it suspiciously similiar to the man pages, also... ;)

use POSIX qw( setsid ctime );
if ( $DAEMON ) {
    my $log = "/var/log/$0.log";
    chdir '/' or die "Can't chdir to /: $!";
    open STDIN, '/dev/null' or die "Can't read /dev/null: $!";
    open STDOUT, ">>$log" or die "Can't write to $log: $!";
    {
    defined(my $pid = fork) or die "Can't fork: $!";
    exit if $pid; # kill the parent to detach
    }
    setsid or die "Can't start a new session: $!";
    open STDERR, '>&STDOUT' or die "Can't dup stdout: $!";
}

print "Started $0 at ".ctime(time);
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