If you are just finding on the CDRW to wake it, what would be wrong with :

while (1) {
# mabe a notice that your app is waiting for CDRW device to wake up he
+re...
open (TESTCDRW, ">$path_to_cdrw/touchtest.txt") and last;
sleep 1;
}
close (TESTCDRW);
do your stuff here...
[download]

instead of finding the cdrw data? This should loop until the cdrw is able to be written to.

-Waswas