http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=2890


in reply to How do I examine the status of a process?

In general, you can use "kill" with signal number zero to check on the existence of a process. See 'man perlipc' for details. Here's code:
use strict; MAIN: { my $pid = $ARGV[0]; if (kill 0 => $pid) { print STDOUT "Process '$pid' exists\n"; } else { print STDOUT "Process '$pid' does not exist\n"; } }