Yes, by default, exec closes all of your file handles except for STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. See $^F in perlvar. But that will probably only be part of the solution. You may also have to turn off the close-on-exec flag on some file handles directly. See F_GETFD and F_SETFD in Fcntl.

The file descriptors are what are not closed so you have to do the equivalent of fdopen() to get Perl file handles reassociated with them:     open( FILE, ">&=$fd" )  or  die ... where $fd is 0 for STDIN, 1 for STDOUT, 2 for STDERR (and Perl already reopened those for you) and you have to pass the new instance of the script the values for the file descriptors you want to reopen, for example:     exec( $^X, $0, fileno(SOCK), fileno(LOG) ); and

    open( SOCK, "<&=$ARGV[0]" )  or  die ...
    open( LOG, ">>&=$ARGV[1]" )  or  die ...
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Update: Restarting a long-running process from time to time can be very useful (reduces memory footprint, clears likely subtle internal corruptions due to low-profile bugs, etc.). And if you go with catching signals and not restarting the process, then be sure to use Perl v5.8 or later.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")