Ok, I'll bite. How can you do this? Is there a basic template/framework that just opens a socket and talks back and forth between whoever's on the other side? I used to do this in C decades ago (sheesh), but it's alien to me in perl. (Well, I'd rather use a package that facilitates this, if one exists, rather than write it using raw code from scratch.)

FWIW, my use of this would be extremely similar to the example posed by the originator of this thread. In my case, I have keywords associated with all my photos on my site, and I just want to optimize the way users search for images based on those keywords. I have the code all written and works fine, technically, but I hate the fact that the entire textfile-DB has to load/parse every time, just to spew out answers and the close up shop... and to do this for EVERY search. It seems that the best thing to do is have a daemon do the open, and then perform searches (based on perl hashes) for each query. Any potential drawback with this?