Hi, mojodaddy!

I'm not awake enough to deal with buffering of print statements, but I will compliment you on re-inventing the concept of a pidfile. Good going! {and, I don't mean that facetiously! :-}

There's another cool concept in UN!X and BSD and Linux called "respawning" in init. In Linux (since you mentioned that) you just find the little file called /etc/inittab and add a line at the end of it with your program name, like so:

my:2345:respawn:/usr/local/bin/myprog.pl -m -y --options

where 'my' is a token up to three characters, '2345' says run it in all Runlevels from multi-user to X GUI, 'respawn' says 'restart if it dies', and the rest is the path to your executable program and its options.

To kick it off, either reset the init process with kill -1 1 or restart your computer. This is a simplified description, but the result is that the init process will do all your restarting work for you. You won't have direct writing of stderr or stdout to a terminal there, but you can learn how to associate your process with a running program or with syslogd and there you go, off on another exploration! :D