Between this and your other writeup today, it seems as if you are looking at writing administrative scripts. May I suggest that you find and browse the book Perl for System Administration, by David N. Blank-Edelman, published by O'Reilly and Associates (reviewed here). I suspect that it may cover/introduce several of the items you appear to be interested in (including process control, which appears in chapter 4).

Hope that helps...

I was wondering what kind of system commands I would use to write a program that will just show me details on current running programs + status example process id, user, process, state, cpu, memory used, virtual memory size, resident set size and major page faults if any

Unfortunately, you forgot to tell us what is the system you are working on...

Update: read this for some suggestions

Also check his script repository for more admin scripts.

Update: I include a simple script that takes a command line parameter and searches for that in the process list and kills all instances found.. to test simply launch many notepad.exe processes.. then run the following script I.e. pkill.pl notepad

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32;
use Win32::API;
use Win32::Process;
use Win32::OLE qw( in );    #Identify the Process that have been left 
+to kill
use Win32::OLE::Variant;    #Identify the Process that have been left 
+to kill

my $app = $ARGV[0];

if ($app) {
    my $rc     = 1;
    my $srv = "\\\\" . $ENV{'COMPUTERNAME'};

    my $CLASS = "winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}$srv\\Root\\
+cimv2";
    my $WMI = Win32::OLE->GetObject( $CLASS ) || die;
    foreach my $Proc ( sort {lc $a->{Name} cmp lc $b->{Name}} in( $WMI
+->InstancesOf( "Win32_Process" ) ) )
    {

        my $regex1 = "($app)";

        if ($Proc->{Name} =~ /$regex1/i) {
            print "INFORMATION - About to kill $Proc->{ProcessID} for 
+$app\n";
            unless (Win32::Process::KillProcess($Proc->{ProcessID}, 0)
+) {
                print "Could not kill $Proc->{ProcessID} for $app\n";
            }
        }
    }
}
else {
    print "$0 <app name>\n";
    print "<app name> = name and extension or (part therof I.e. note f
+or notepad) of process to kill\n";
}
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