G'day swissknife,

I see you got a couple of quick replies to your immediate problem.

For future reference, check this from open:

"If the open involved a pipe, the return value happens to be the pid of the subprocess."

And this from kill:

"If SIGNAL is either the number 0 or ... This is useful to check that a child process is still alive ..."

[Read the full details, caveats, portability issues and so on for both of those.]

As a general technique for checking on this sort of process, you can do something along these lines:

my $pid = open my $pipe, '-|', ...
...
if (kill 0 => $pid) {
    # actions if process alive
}
else {
    # actions if process not alive
}
[download]