Here's something basic that should work. It will save the output of a ps -ef command to a file then use a regex to search if ftpd is running.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
 
# See if ftp is running
 
my $result;
my $file = "/tmp/df";
my $cmd1 = "ps -ef";
 
# Run the ps -ef command
$result = `$cmd1 >$file`;
 
# Open the file and search if the daemon is running
 
open (FILE, $file) or die "can't open $file: $!";
 
while (<FILE>){
  if (/ftpd/){
   print "The ftp daemon is running\n";
  }
}
[download]

HTP
-Dru
Another satisfied monk.