If the "monitoring machine" has an SNMP manager, you might use SNMP or Net::SNMP to build a small agent (code that responds to SNMP requests) that responded to queries about status and would stop and/or restart your program. The agent could be part of your existing program or a separate program that starts and stops the real application and can check if it is running. Of course if the agent dies, all beta are off.

I like the idea of integrating the agent into your program: then you could possibly return "meaningful" information to your "monitoring machine" and possibly even generate SNMP traps if an interesting event occurs. You could then have a program to restart it if it dies*.

Of course, if the monitoring machine is browser-based, I'd use an agent that works that way, although there is Apache::WebSNMP if you want to talk to an SNMP agent via a web interface...

* If you fork() a child process, wait blocks until it dies. This is what system does as in nardo's example. On some platforms (e.g. *nix) you can arrange to have a signal sent to your process when a child dies, so you can do something else while the child is doing its work.

HTH, --traveler